Some final thoughts
Friends:
Today is my last day as guest blogger and author in TPM Cafe's Table For One. Thank you all very much for allowing me to share my excitement about my new book, "Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a War." I really think the story is crucial to understanding how we got led into such a tragic and unnecessary war. Plus, if you'll permit me, it's a gripping read.
After the book was released last week, I appeared on The Colbert Report and on CNN. The Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times both wrote hugely positive reviews. I was interviewed for an hour on the Diane Rehm show, on NPR, and spoke on about 15 other radio networks and stations. Other newspaper reviews and broadcast interviews are scheduled. The book is now out in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Translations are underway in Germany, Japan and Brazil. Plus the film is in casting!
Here is the conclusion from a review that appears in today's San Francisco Chronicle:
"In chronicling the perfect storm of ideology, dishonesty and incompetence that transformed a liar's fabrications into a casus belli, he has preserved for posterity a crucial chapter of the Bush years. "Curveball" achieves the synthesis all investigative journalism aspires to: penetrating reportage, trenchant political commentary and page-turning drama." - Elbert Ventura, San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 26, 2007
I hope you'll consider reading Curveball. You can learn more about it, and me, on my website: www.curveballbook.com.
In the meantime, here is a very condensed version of several key chapters in the book:
On Feb. 8, 2003, three days after Colin Powel's pressed the case for war on Iraq at the U.N. Security Council by highlighting Curveball's "eyewitness" account of bio-weapons production, a convoy of U.N. weapons inspectors made their first visit ever to a dusty warehouse compound outside Baghdad called Djerf al Nadaf.Curveball had said he had built and operated the first three mobile germ factories at Djerf al Nadaf. Powell had indicated a bio-accident killed 12 people there. According to the intelligence, Djerf was the smoking gun for Saddam's illicit biological weapons program.
Armed with a detailed file provided to the U.N. in New York by U.S., British and German intelligence agencies, the American-led Bravo Team of weapons inspectors tore the place apart. Scientists took "wipes and swipes" to test for DNA or other biological material that might be lodged in pipes, ventilation ducts, cement cracks and atop light fixtures. A retired U.S. Air Force officer used ground penetrating radar to search for buried material. Weapons hunters grilled the manager and workers, confiscated office records, and did follow-up interviews in Baghdad. They took 60 photographs, including tire tracks in the yard.
Testing that afternoon back at the U.N. bio-lab at the Canal Hotel found no DNA or other evidence of biological material. Worse, Curveball had claimed the trucks entered the main, L-shaped warehouse at the long end and exited through a strange swinging door at the far turn. But the inspectors confirmed that a solid, six-foot-high wall blocked trucks from entering where he claimed, and the far corner concealed no swinging door. Nor did the inspectors find any sign of the systems necessary to provide containment, water, power, or waste disposal necessary for production of lethal biological agents.
Over the next month, team members followed the same intense drill at the six other sites across Iraq where Curveball had claimed other mobile germ factories had been assembled or operated.
In each case, his information was accurate to a point - as if he had seen pictures, or someone had described the buildings to him. But once inside, nothing matched up - and no evidence was found. A DIA officer secretly working with the U.N. inspectors reported the disappointing results to U.S. intelligence.
The chief U.N. inspector in Iraq met in early March with Saddam's top weapons scientist and pleaded with him for help in finding the bio-trucks. Soon after, Iraqi aides delivered to the U.N. photos and videos of dozens of trucks that might possibly be confused as a weapons van: military morgue trucks, bakery trucks, ice trucks, food testing trucks, drug delivery trucks, etc. The germ production vehicles did not exist, they insisted.
But it was impossible to prove a negative. And it was too late. The war began days later.
Excuse me for being somewhat blunt about the content of your book; but isn't this material old hat? Don't we already know this stuff? Isn't this all "NO DUH!" type re-hashing. Do you have any conclusive action items or is this just another, albeit more organized, compendium of our 7-year citizen torture scenario with all the hook words like "lies" and "con-man?"
We need action; please, no more wallowing in didactic angst, perturbation and fear mongering. The politicians have let us down and apparently have no solutions either. I've got plenty of cocktail party and water cooler discussion material to last for years. mybe I'll wait for the movie.
October 26, 2007 8:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
I very much recommend this book. For those interested in how and why this war happened, this book is a valuable piece of the puzzle. Part of the criticism that I am reading here, is that it doesn't take into account the DOD's intelligence manipulation and how it fed the war fever, but I don't think that was the author's purpose. Naturally, I don't speak for the author, but having read the book I think that Drogin accomplished what he set out to do - give us a detailed and well researched explanation of how the CIA failed in its mission - to give the administration an honest and thorough accounting of what they knew to be true even under withering political pressure to game the intelligence.
I'm not so sure the outcome would have been any different if the CIA had been less of a bureaucracy, obviously the administration had planned this war since they first took office, but if the truth had been more important than careers and "upper management's" eagerness to please it might have slowed the process and at the very least, given some bite to those in the government that saw a disaster waiting to happen.
We have a better understanding now of what happened when truth and ambition collided at a desparate time - and how easily truth was thrown overboard.
Another book which I think adds to the picture is James Risen's "State of War, The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration" - it is a good rundown on how pervasive the problems were and continued to be long after "mission accomplished."
October 26, 2007 8:25 AM | Reply | Permalink
Action requires deciding just what to do. Knowledge of what happened before is always helpful.
October 26, 2007 9:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
I can't think of any wars that were launched on the basis of correct intelligence. Nor can I think of any that were prevented, with the possible exception of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
On the former, wars happen when a substantial political wing of a country feels the need. On the latter, it has been, at least in recent times, the caution and good sense of soldiers in charge of missiles that helped hold off the panic and encouaged standing down from an alert.
The lesson I would take from the Iraq "misadventure" (as a UK paper put it) is that the only intel that is sound is public, such as the UN inspections. Just like the only confession that is meaningful is the willing one.
Of course we have to try to discern the intentions and capabilities of other countries, but we should remember that we have been wrong way more than we have been right. Also to remember is that the countries with intelligence accomplishments that impress us were such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
We did in fact completely miss the delivery of missiles to Cuba; only the accomplished fact was discovered. And even if the installation had proceeded to completion the outcome would likely have been the same---the US trading away the Jupiter missiles in Turkey for the ones in Cuba.
October 26, 2007 9:17 AM | Reply | Permalink
So, um, what kind of actions are you taking?
October 26, 2007 9:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
Bob,
while I've not yet red your book, although most likely some previous articles you may have contributed to, I think it's great of you to present your work here - and at other places.
That some commentators have embarrased themselves should hopefully not be your lasting impression. Your work ought to be judged as for what it is, not for what it's not. The grand analysis can not be successful until the detailed examinations, like the one you've attempted to, are done.
The big question for me, at least, is why the German assessment of this source's credibility wasn't given more weight in the processing by American agencies. I will read through what you've written once again - maybe I'll find an answer.
/Tuomas
October 26, 2007 10:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm working on an article that discusses the very delicate balance between analysts having their data accepted as plausible by policymakers, and analysts cherry-picking data to support preconceptions. There's quite a substantial body of unclassified CIA material on this issue. When it's somewhat better together, I'll give a link.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
October 26, 2007 10:29 AM | Reply | Permalink
I wasn't implying that it was "correct" or "incorrect" intelligence that was the problem, although of course, that is always a problem. In this case, their were objections to this particular piece of intelligence at more than a few levels and the objections were ignored. The greatest impediment to the truth being told was Tenet's own ambition, his need to be "liked" and his reluctance to fight an intra agency war with Rumsfeld. It wasn't just a matter of poor judgement on his part, it was a conscious decision to tell the administration what they wanted to hear rather than what they needed to hear, no matter what the consequences. This takes more courage than most people have, but then the stakes were so much higher in this than bureaucratic infighting.
Wars happen for many reasons and there are many causes and I thought that this book helped in understanding the how and why of this war. No book can give us the entire picture of how and why and what when wrong but this book does explain at least one part of the puzzle. There are a few very good books on this war and this is one of them. ("Rise of the Vulcans" is very good too.)
I've learned many lessons from this war, but the one lesson that I learned was in my opinion, the most tragic - that it's only one act or two that takes us from fighting nazis to being nazis. I can't think of any time in this country when I have been this ashamed of being an American - in fact, I don't know what that even means anymore. I'd love to think that these men will burn in hell for this, but I know there is no hell, and what will happen is that they'll continue to make great fortunes from this misery and continue to heap honours and tributes upon themselves.
There isn't one moment of the day when I'm not thinking of our son (and all of our sons and daughters) in the middle of this quagmire - how they could take someone so young and idealistic, a true believer in the legend of Cincinnatus and George Washington, who thinks that all good citizens should be able to come to the defense of their country and use him like a piece of equipment they can throw away when it gets broken.
I keep thinking that if I know why it happened some how I'll be able to reconcile what is happening to him with what could be happening for him. I know it's foolish and downright impossible, but it brings me comfort to know that there are people like Drogin who think the truth is important and it is still necessary to record it. Personally, I think that takes some courage when this administration has no compunctions about ruining the lives of their perceived enemies.
I apologize for rambling off topic, Tom.
October 26, 2007 10:39 AM | Reply | Permalink
Bob
You have changed my mind about some things. I believed, as did many others, that we were deliberately lied to by the people who started the war and that they knew they were lying.
There was always one nagging question that I had about that hypothesis; namely why didn't the US arrange to plant evidence of WMD activity in Iraq after the invasion if they all knew that there was none? Well, if they all really believed their own propaganda then there would have been no incentive to plan in advance. Once in there with our inspectors it would be too late to plant the evidence.
Also my earlier beliefs have been influenced by retired CIA officials that have been blaming top Bush people for this fiasco. The top obviously are to blame for their own stupidity, but I can see that CIA professionals are covering up their own buffoonish behavior
October 26, 2007 12:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you for writing the book. I hope that having all your research in book form helps in some small way to make our next president more interested in truly reforming the C.I.A. and how it is used. Many of your posts here reminded me of how another president, our most recent Democratic one, was very ill-served with bombing target choices, making them controversial enough to influence how seriously certain threats were taken by the public, and causing "wag the dog" claims:
Or as in this wonderful incident which if worse might have started WWIII:
October 26, 2007 1:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
Bev,
Interested to know, since from reading many of your past comments on this site, you seem well-read on a lot of these topics. Did you get the sense from your reading that an excessively sick culture of CIA believing their own cherry-picking had developed partly because of some sense of guilt over not "catching" 9/11 beforehand, or is it just the same old same old unprofessional bureaucracy ending up trying to please the president and Congress in power at the time?
October 26, 2007 2:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you for all your interest and your kind words. Special thanks to BevD and anyone else who bought and read my book! I tried this week to explain what I wrote and why in Curveball, and I hope I added a useful perspective to the debate.
Two last thoughts from my side. If Bush and his aides really "knew" that Saddam possessed absolutely no WMD, as some writers this week argued, why in God's name would the White House use WMD as the principal rationale for invasion? How many hundreds, how many thousands of people, would have to be in that conspiracy? Not just in Washington, but in governments around the world. It's not even plausible. Obviously we would find out the rationale was phony once invading troops scoured the country - as we have - and Bush's administration and his legacy would look even worse as a result.
As a national security reporter and armchair student of history, I have learned a pretty reliable rule of thumb: never assume a dark conspiracy to explain events when mere incompetence will do.
Let's remember that no one - by this I include the French, German and Russian governments, as well as Hans Blix, head of the U.N. weapons inspectors - no one with access to Western intelligence or sealed U.N. reports claimed that Iraq possessed no ongoing WMD programs, preparations or stockpiles. Saddam's regime was the only authority to make that claim. The pre-war debates at the U.N. always focused on how best to contain Saddam, how to get him to comply with U.N. resolutions, how to strengthen inspections and stiffen sanctions, etc., NOT whether the WMD existed. It was assumed in every capital. Blix never declared Saddam WMD free. I am not defending this terrible war, or one iota of Bush's policy. I opposed it then, and I oppose it now. I'm simply stating facts.
By the same token, I don't understand why some people are obsessed with arguing that Bush lied about Saddam's WMD. Bush led us into the worst foreign policy nightmare since Vietnam. We're mired in a tragic conflict with no end in sight. Bush's misjudgments and mistakes surely rank with those of Nixon, and I suspect history will judge him far more harshly. Whether Bush deliberately lied or not seems wildly beside the point. Every president, at least since FDR, has lied to the public. (Jimmy Carter was the first and last to claim he wouldn't, and he lied about that.) We as a nation are sacrificing untold amounts of blood, treasure and prestige because of this administration's faulty judgments, arrogance and incompetence. Isn't that bad enough?
Anyway, thanks again everyone. I hope you enjoy the book.
Sincerely,
Bob Drogin
www.curveballbook.com
October 26, 2007 2:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
Since I've had occasion to be looking through the Cuban declassified records recently, it wasn't completely random, although things were missed. Apparently, a warning from our best Soviet source, Oleg Penkovsky, didn't make it all the way into the analysis pipeline. Also, there apparently was SIGINT that suggested that something was happening in Cuba; those U-2 flights around October 14, 1962, which were of increasing risk, were not accidents. Once the first pictures came in, reconnaisssance stepped up enormously.
I'm not sure I'd agree that only public intelligence is reliable, in that especially with technical collection systems, the results need to be reviewed by independent experts -- it's one thing to deal with an agent report, but quite another to interpret MASINT sensors or traffic analysis. AFAIK, we still don't have a positive handle on that possible nuclear test in the South Atlantic, off the South African coast.
Right now, I'm struggling with an article on the overall intelligence process -- the technical sensors were easier.
As part of that writing, I've looked at intelligence failures. Stalin, for example, had quite decent early warning of the impending German invasion, but refused to believe it. Pearl Harbor is iffier, in that the true smoking gun messages weren't decrypted until about a week later. Israel had fairly solid indication about the Yom Kippur attack in 1973, but chose not to preempt.
Would Hitler have pressed the attack if he knew the Soviets were alert? If the Japanese knew the Hawaii strike force had been detected, I still think they would have attacked.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
October 26, 2007 2:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Now after presenting a nicely argued position you have to go piss on your shoe with
No honest person could make that claim no matter what they knew: it is impossible to prove a negative.
October 26, 2007 3:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't know - that's my honest answer. In my opinion, it wasn't so much guilt as it was fear. Tenet was most afraid of not being considered a player in this - he seemed to want more than anything to be an "insider". He not only told the President and vice-President what he thought they wanted to hear, he told everyone what he thought they wanted to hear. Cheney and Rumsfeld ruled the roost and Tenet didn't have the balls to go against them - of course the writing was on the wall - anyone who did was not only frozen out but had their lives ruined too.
During the run up to this war, an effort was made to cultivate family members of Iraqi scientists and send them back to Iraq to spy for the U.S. Everyone they sent came back saying there was nothing there and they simply buried that information. Even during the occupation, any CIA officers who wrote what they call "aardwolfs" - an honest assessment of what is going on - they were removed from their posts in Iraq and Afghanistan and assigned to the bowels of the CIA. The truth was a career killer. Frankly, I don't believe that the only reason Valerie Plame was "outed" was to punish Joe Wilson, I believe that the real reason was to send a clear message to the analysts at the CIA that they better stay with the program. That's not the conventional wisdom, but it makes sense when you read how ruthless and determined this administration is to silence critics.
I've read history all my life, and I can't think of any administration that is so sick and twisted and anti-American. These people despise the constitution and they despise the law and this culture extended throughout all of Washington D.C. It infected every department - defiance of the law by everyone from the president on down. Frankly, I don't know if we'll ever recover from this culture of lawlessness - that is always the sickness that brings down governments - the sense that some people don't have to operate by the rules, if you don't like them, you go around them and you get what you want no matter what.
People have become so intimidated that they fear to use the analogy of nazi Germany, they're afraid of the criticism, but this is exactly what happened in Germany, and this is exactly how nazis operated. They stole power, they invaded and occupied other countries, they tortured people, they made a mockery of the law, they intimidated and destroyed their enemies and the press - and this is just what we know about. Who knows what other hells we'll discover, if we ever do.
October 26, 2007 3:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
I wanted to thank you, Mr. Drogin, for your articles and especially for your willingness to respond to our questions. It's appreciated.
But it still looks like I'm the odd person out here, because I still have some doubts about the Curveball-as-hapless-fabricator story. For instance, I just ran across an article in the Guardian that says that Curveball is the brother of a top aide to Chalabi. If true, that would put a rather different spin on things. And there is also the report by Tyler Drumheller, longtime CIA veteran and former head of covert operations in Europe, who said in a CBS interview with reporter Ed Bradley that the CIA did have confirmation from within the Iraqi inner circle that there were no WMDs, and that Bush and Cheney knew this.
There just seem to be loose ends remaining.I guess I'll have to read the book...
"If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." ~~ Abraham Maslow
October 26, 2007 7:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
Wordie, you're not the only one as I think it crazy to accept "intelligence" with zero cross-checking or supporting evidence and validation, and a healthy scepticism about manipulation -- something Bush and his administration has no intellectual capacity for when it suits them.
Personally, rather than Curveball being central, it would seem he was the pawn move that suckered Tenet into ingratiating himself with the administration. Not that the endrun would have been anything different as the administration would have just continued to adapt their message, and the craven pols would have voted the same way.
As a quibble, Rice, of course, was NSA not Secretary of State; presumably just a slip of Drumheller's detail memory.
October 26, 2007 9:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Forgot to add: Thanks, Mr. Drogin.
October 26, 2007 9:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
~
In the event others did not see my previous comment in Mr Drogin's previous thread:
As more comes to light in the future, just keep this in mind.
~OGD~
October 26, 2007 11:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
I hate to say it but I have to agree with the first commenter.
The issue is not what the French, German, Russian governments knew or thought they knew in October, or what Blix knew then, it is what we all collectively knew by February. By which point 'The Decider' had openly proclaimed that the decision was his and his alone.
Was Bush lying in September? Depends on how you define it. Was he lying in February and March when he said 'The decision to go to war has not been made' and that Saddam could prevent the war by disarming? Absolutely. I doubt anyone in Bush's inner circle really thought Saddam was an existential threat to the US in the Fall of 2002, certainly nobody could have maintained that position in March of 2003, but Iraq remained the absolutely necessary first step in the NeoCon dream of transforming the Middle East by taking out Iran and Syria.
BushCo simply went for the Hail Mary, assuming they would find something, anything to justify their drumbeat for war. I think you are too narrowly focused on the first half of the following phrase: "Bush lied, GIs/people died". It may be that all Presidents lie here or there, I can't think of a political lie that had the same consequences as this one.
That is why we are obsessed. Because all of the evidence is that they are once again fixing the intelligence around the policy on Iran. It is vitally important that people understand that we didn't blunder into Iraq on faulty information, but that Bush made a fully informed decision to take this country to war when he knew to a near certainty that Saddam had nothing that would put this country at risk. And is prepared to do it again in Iran.
Lies about what was or was not edited out of a climate change report? Bad. Lies that could launch the Middle East into a conflagration that the NeoCons are already calling APPROVINGLY WWIV? Appallingly horrible.
October 27, 2007 8:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
artappraiser,
Why the simplistic binary straw-man question: was it EITHER a sick culture of the guilt ridden OR unprofessional lap-dogs.
Is there room for other possibilities?
**********************************************
“I, ..., do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic..."
October 27, 2007 8:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yes. I guess it just bothers me that we pretty much know that the story of the other hapless individual (Rocco Martino, in the case of the forged Niger documents) whose info was said to have led us to war turns out to not really be quite the case. So that considerably raises my level of skepticism when I'm presented with a second story of a hapless individual with a false story.
"If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." ~~ Abraham Maslow
October 27, 2007 10:18 AM | Reply | Permalink
Before committing this nation to war and sending men and women in uniform to their deaths, the Cheney administration needed 'actionable intelligence'.
'actionable intelligence' - politician decides on the action, intelligence created to support it.
October 28, 2007 8:41 PM | Reply | Permalink