What Bush Really Knew About WMDs

From forgotten scandals to "The Last Dick," read the entire Daily Beast Farewell to Bush Chronicles.

Sajjad Safari, Mehr News Agency / AP Photo A former top CIA official reveals new details about the run-up to the war in Iraq.

In the mid-1990s, Western intelligence services picked up a fragment of information coming out of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq discussing the development of mobile biological weapons production facilities. There were no details or corroborating information. While the report caused a stir in the analytical community, there was no policy effect. The U.S. analysts who saw this report could not have known that the concept of mobile facilities, which had been raised as a cost saving measure, had been dropped by the Iraqis. Several years later, in a tragic twist of history, this tidbit was dredged up, setting the stage for a series of intelligence fabrications used to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

As the 1990s wore on, the Western allies continued to worry about secret weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in Iraq. Hussein fed this fear, for his own purposes, possibly to keep his enemies Iran and Israel off balance, or simply for eccentric reasons we will never understand. U.N. weapons inspectors continued to pursue the issue, despite the abuse heaped on them because they could not confirm what many considered to be a foregone conclusion. Sadly, as it turns out, these UN inspectors were collecting truly accurate intelligence that was being discounted and dismissed.

At our first management meeting after the 2001 inauguration, it became clear that the Bush administration had a serious interest in Iraq.

In the fall of 1999, a young Iraqi chemical engineer turned up in Europe seeking asylum in an allied country. He became known by the cryptonym, Curveball, and the story he told would lead to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and change the world, although none of the story was true.

Curveball was the troubled son of a middle class Iraqi family, who had worked at the Iraqi pesticide facility at Djerf al-Nadaf that had been a biological weapons facility before the first Gulf war. He knew enough of the jargon of the industry and enough about the pipes, valves and other physical aspects of the plant to allow him to convince a willing audience that the plant was still a covert weapons facility. Curveball tried desperately to ingratiate himself to the officials of the country where he wanted to stay, describing various facets of what appeared to be a mobile WMD capability. He was very clever and never specifically said what was on the trailers he described. He only said that he had been told that the containers held highly toxic material in containers marked “A” through “E.” In this way, he maintained his story without getting pinned down on details.

The European service passed on his reporting to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which subsequently produced over 100 intelligence reports. At this point, no American had met Curveball and CIA Directorate of Operations (DO) had not been asked to validate the reporting. Instead, U.S. and allied Western intelligence analysts applied the reporting to their existing theories on Iraq. This was particularly true in the U.S., where a small group of CIA analysts supported by the DIA seized upon Curveball’s reporting as the heart of their previously unconfirmed judgments regarding the WMD threat from Iraq.

The arrival of the Bush administration in January 2001 brought a new focus on Iraq with it. At that time I was Chief of Europe at the CIA, and at our first management meeting after the inauguration it became clear that the new administration had a serious interest in Iraq. The convergence of high level interest and analytical commitment set the stage for the disasters to come.

This interest in Iraq was theoretical until the events of September 11, 2001. After the terrorist attacks, administration officials systemically sought to link Saddam Hussein with Al Qaeda, while stepping up the effort to identify a strategic threat from Iraq. The Curveball reporting fell into this category. Over time, as reports from other sources were debunked, the analysts who believed in Curveball defended their case against those who pointed out the inconsistencies in his story. In the end, Curveball was the only source they wanted to believe left to support the threat of a clandestine WMD program.