Iraq WMD intelligence
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Iraq WMD intelligence is John Kiriakou's account of how the case for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was manufactured. The consensus of every effect analyst across the intelligence community, CIA, DIA, the Department of Energy, was that Iraq had no WMD at the time, though it may have had them once. But the White House had already decided to invade and overthrow Saddam Hussein, and sought analysis to support the policy, "exactly the opposite of what you're supposed to do." When George Tenet told President Bush it was a "slam dunk," Kiriakou says, there was no intelligence analysis behind the conclusion, "none." The staged image of Colin Powell at the UN, flanked by Tenet and John Negroponte, was meant to imply total certainty; "the entire policy was based on a lie." Kiriakou recalls a senior National Security Council official, in a briefing on the coming invasion, predicting Iraqis would "throw flowers at us" as U.S. troops crossed the border, a prediction Kiriakou says showed the official had never been to the Middle East or read any history, since Iraqis would rather live under Saddam Hussein than be occupied by the American army. He also recalls that when CIA officers demanded access to a highly-touted WMD source, the Pentagon eventually admitted the source was Ahmed Chalabi, whose information proved entirely false, "not a single word is true, not a single word we went to war for this."

Cheney's manufactured intelligence unit

Kiriakou says Dick Cheney mandated the creation of a separate intelligence unit inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense, run by a man he identifies as "Kelby" and his staff, whose job was simply to manufacture false intelligence claiming WMD were "all over Iraq," feeding conclusions the CIA could not source or verify no matter how hard it pressed to see the underlying reporting. He separately recalls a liaison intelligence service providing Iraq-related reporting around 2002 that was so poorly formatted, not even in the right font, that it was obviously fake and was thrown away by the analysts who received it.

"We're going to invade Iraq": the first-day briefing

Kiriakou says that on his first day as executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations, after returning from Pakistan on the strength of the Abu Zubaydah capture, a security officer told him, after he signed six secrecy agreements, that the following year the U.S. would invade Iraq, overthrow Saddam Hussein, and build the world's largest U.S. air force base in southern Iraq, relocating American air assets out of Saudi Arabia specifically to deny Osama bin Laden the propaganda point that the U.S. was "polluting the land of the two holy mosques." He says this conversation took place on May 6, 2002, nearly a year before the invasion was announced, and that the officer told him the decision had already been made and the "battle lines" already drawn: the pro-invasion faction was the Office of the Vice President, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council, while the anti-war faction was the CIA, the State Department, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Motive: revenge, not WMD

Asked directly what he believed the true nature of the Iraq War was, Kiriakou says he has always believed it was revenge, from the first Gulf War through to the 1992,93 attempt to assassinate George H.W. Bush, carried from "Daddy Bush to son Bush." He estimates that as many as 2 million people died from the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the offshoot conflicts they spawned, such as Somalia. Separately, discussing 9/11, Kiriakou says roughly 2 million Muslims were killed in the 20 years that followed, an outcome he says was good for Israel, since it led directly to the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, whom Israel had long lobbied the U.S. to attack.

The eleven months of preparation

Retelling the first-day briefing in 2026, Kiriakou put a duration on what followed it. Told that the decision had been made, that the battle lines were drawn between the Office of the Vice President, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the National Security Council on one side and the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department on the other, he asked what they were supposed to do; the answer was "We do as we're ordered to do. We're going to go to war with Iraq." From March 2002 to February 2003, he says, "it was all about getting ready to fight the Iraqis. And for what reason? There was no reason."

He also states the internal consensus on the pretext without qualification: "I never encountered a CIA officer who ever believed that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda." The rationale he had been given for the war on his first day was in any case a different one entirely, moving American air assets out of Saudi Arabia into the largest air force base in the world, to deprive Osama bin Laden of the ability to say the United States was polluting the land of the two holy mosques.

The pretext was interchangeable

Kiriakou has put the causation the other way round from the usual account. The Israelis, along with the neoconservatives, had been working on the American government so consistently since the beginning of the Clinton administration that by 2003 there was "almost no way out of it." In retrospect, he says, "of course we attacked Iraq."

On that reading the intelligence was not the cause of the war but the paperwork for it: "Even if we hadn't made up the whole notion of weapons of mass destruction, we would have made up something else to justify an attack on Iraq." He points to Dick Cheney's parallel effort to connect Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda as the alternative pretext being developed alongside.

"They don't read history"

Kiriakou dates his loss of confidence in the people he had spent his twenties respecting to around his twelfth year in the CIA, when he began to realise that the offices and individuals he had held in immense regard did not know what they were talking about. The example he gives is a White House meeting at which he heard it said, as a flat prediction, that when American forces crossed the border into Iraq the next day the Iraqi people would throw flowers at them. His own reaction was to wonder whether the speakers had ever read any history or knew anything about the Middle East. When he raised it afterwards with his boss, the CIA's deputy director at the time, the answer was: "no, they don't read history. And they don't know what they're talking about."

An earlier telling attributes the prediction to a man on the National Security Council and carries it past the prediction to its collapse. The Iraqis, he had said the day before the move into Iraq, would line the streets and throw flowers in front of the American tanks, so grateful would they be at being liberated, and he was shocked when they started shooting back. Kiriakou supplies the reason in a clause: "because we were invading their country." His verdict on the group is that they had no idea what they were in for, and that none of them were students of history, which he found shocking.

Manufacturing the connection

On the underlying intelligence, Kiriakou's statement is categorical: in the run-up to the war it did not show in any way that there was any connection, however remote, between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The Bush administration, under the leadership of Dick Cheney and with his friends and subordinates at the Pentagon, simply created one.

He also rejects the assumption that intelligence naturally receives its due from the leadership it serves; in his experience the opposite was often true.

Inside the analytic debate

Kiriakou places himself at the centre of the question rather than at its edge. At the time he was executive assistant to the Iraq mission manager, and says the post made him privy to literally every piece of intelligence coming in on Iraq.

What he describes from that seat is not a suppressed consensus but an unresolved one. There were protracted battles inside the CIA over whether the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction, with analysts going at each other's throats; at the end of it they simply could not agree. The conclusion, in his account, was that they did not know, which is the finding that the Pentagon channel was built to route around.

He is candid about how persuasive the alternative looked from inside. Reading the Defense Department intelligence reports as they arrived, his own reaction was to wonder whether the CIA had missed something, because the reports were so specific, until a colleague pointed out that they never said who the source was.

The parallel channel

Kiriakou's shortest statement of how the case was assembled makes it a procurement problem rather than an analytical failure. "When he wasn't getting the intelligence that he wanted from the CIA, he just had the Defense Department create its own intelligence through Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. They just made it up."

The agency's own position, he says, never moved: "the CIA said repeatedly that there were no weapons of mass destruction, and Cheney insisted that no, there were, and the CIA just hadn't found them. So the Iraqi National Congress and Ahmed Chalabi said there were, so we're going to war for that."

See also

- Colin Powell
- Lawrence Wilkerson
- Saddam Hussein
- Dick Cheney
- Abu Zubaydah
