The US Decision to Invade Iraq in March, 2003, Chasing Phantom WMDs: How Human Intelligence was Used, Abused and Politicized to "fix the facts around the policy."

Abstract

The US Decision to Invade Iraq in March, 2003, Chasing Phantom WMDs: How Human Intelligence was Used, Abused and Politicized to “fix the facts around the policy.”

Michael Andregg, mmandregg@stthomas.edu for the Fifth “Need to Know” Conference on “The Human Element in Intelligence,” 5-6 November, 2015, in Greifswald, Germany.

abstract – D2

The invasion of Iraq on 19 March, 2003 by U.S. military forces was predicated on two primary “causus belli,” 1) that the government of Saddam Hussein was pursuing active WMD programs on several fronts, including nuclear and biological, and 2) that he had some secret alliance with Al Qaeda of Osama bin Laden. Both of these claims were proven to be false, but only after a country that had not attacked the United States was devastated, its government destroyed, about 100,000 of its citizens killed in the first year and a long aftermath of civil violence unleashed that has not ended 12 years later. The financial cost to the USA is over $1 trillion, including health care for our wounded. The cost to our international reputation may be greater in the long run.

After extensive searches of the country finding no WMDs of any consequence, policy people blamed the American Intelligence Community (IC) for shoddy work, while intelligence insiders tended to blame the policy side for insisting on evidence to support what they desired instead of reality. Rank “politicization” of intelligence was revealed when the head of Britain’s MI6 (foreign intelligence) Sir Richard Dearlove reported to his Prime Minister, Tony Blair on 23 July, 2002 that “the intelligence was being fixed around the policy.” That is a concise definition of politicization, which is a cardinal sin among responsible intelligence analysts.

Several analysts from several US agencies objected to how intelligence assessments were being skewed to sell this war. Many suffered bad consequences for their objections, and at least one had her career destroyed even though Valerie Plame Wilson had not said anything in public about her concerns about factual accuracy. Her husband did write something in the New York Times about Niger, where he had once been US Ambassador. Enraged by some truth in print that contradicted the official story in play, some of the men who had distorted intelligence to start with decided to retaliate by exposing her (Plame’s) career in the National Clandestine Service of the CIA working on nuclear non-proliferation, thus putting at real risk her own family and every non-American source she had cultivated over two decades of work. US and global security were also wounded.

Everyone involved was a human being, from analysts, Vice Presidents and Undersecretaries of Defense, to soldiers, agents, and sources in the field, to thousands of children blown to bits or orphaned by this arguably illegal and immoral war. This paper will focus on how that affected intelligence agents and agencies involved. System level effects on HUMINT operators, sources and networks will be discussed. The role of an “Office of Special Plans” will be detailed, which was created in the Pentagon to bypass quality controls at the CIA and elsewhere in the US-IC. Basically politicians mandated reliance on unvetted and extremely unreliable single sources like “Curveball” in Germany, even after warnings from Germany’s BND. Finally, some comparisons will be made with the failure of early warning in Israel prior to the Yom Kippur War of 1973. In that case Mossad (foreign) and Aman (military intelligence) analysts were blinking red alerts, but the politicians could not believe that attack was coming due to group-think and related problems.