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.[1][2] 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.”[3] 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.”[4] 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.[5] 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.”[6]
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.[7] 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.[8]
”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.”[9][10] 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.[11]
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.”[12][13] 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.[14] 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.[15]