To Start a War by Robert Draper

Author:Robert Draper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

—

On Saturday, December 7, a young UNMOVIC staff member, accompanied by a UN security official, arrived in Baghdad. They were given hand luggage containing twelve thousand pages. About three thousand of those pages constituted Iraq’s formal declaration of its weapons program, and the rest were support materials, mainly in Arabic. The two men flew with their cargo from Baghdad to Cyprus to Frankfurt to New York. From UN headquarters, the documents were transported by FBI helicopter to the CIA’s office in Langley, where copies were made that Sunday evening for each of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council.34

At eight the following morning, several CIA analytical teams—focusing on biological weapons, chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and imports—assembled in a conference room and began to pore over the documents. Rumsfeld had asked the analysts beforehand, How will we know if Saddam’s declaration amounts to compliance? The agency’s answer: We’ll know he has come clean by the way he responds to the assessments made in the NIE and the British intelligence dossier.

Within a week’s time, the CIA analyst entrusted with summarizing the day’s findings in a Presidential Daily Briefing memo, Bill McLaughlin, realized that he was reporting the same thing over and over. Eventually McLaughlin briefed Tenet on Iraq’s weapons declaration. “There was nothing new,” he would recall, “and they certainly didn’t address any of our concerns.”35

“When Cheney’s people saw this pile of rehashed old reports,” recalled a senior administration official, “they wanted to go to war. They said, ‘This is a continuation of the material breach.’”36

Still, by this time Blix’s team had already been combing through sites in Iraq for the past few weeks, with no major discovery. The outlook did not look promising to Bush. As his communications director, Dan Bartlett, would recall, “Look, all the shenanigans with the inspectors was not confidence-inspiring. And this is what you do in a pre-9/11 world: inspectors running around, they’re milking the clock, this is part of the playbook.”37

On the ground in Iraq, Blix was interpreting the situation differently. The twenty sites they inspected during the first week on the job had yielded nothing of interest. Blix still suspected that there were weapons to discover. Was the U.S. intelligence community not telling him everything about where to look? He called a sympathetic ear, Colin Powell, and complained, “You’re like a librarian sitting on all these books that you don’t want to lend.”38

Blix’s concerns were shared by Senator Carl Levin. During a closed hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Levin accused Tenet of withholding information from UNMOVIC about potential WMD sites. Tenet assured the senator that this was not the case.39

Another senior CIA official, WINPAC deputy director Andrew Liepman, was there at the hearing as well. Just a few days earlier, Liepman had been summoned to brief Vice President Cheney on how the CIA would support UNMOVIC’s efforts. In front of Cheney’s staff, Rice, Wolfowitz, and others, the vice president also asked about what information the CIA was giving Blix’s inspectors.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.