Who Forged the Niger Documents?

[Guest guest]

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/21704/

 

Who Forged the Niger Documents?

 

By Ian Masters, AlterNet. Posted April 7, 2005.

 

A former counterterrorism chief claims that the now discredited

documents that showed Iraq trying to purchase uranium were fabricated

right here in the United States.

 

Editor's Note: This is an edited transcript of an interview conducted

by Ian Masters with Vincent Cannistaro, the former CIA head of

counterterrorism operations and intelligence director at the National

Security Council under Ronald Reagan, which aired on the Los Angeles

public radio KPFK on April 3, 2005.

 

Ian Masters: You've been following President Bush's commission's

report that came out this week, featuring fairly much, in terms of the

press coverage, questions about " Curveball, " apparently a very

appropriately named agent that the German intelligence was working.

And, apparently his intelligence was heavily relied upon as a

justification for going into war, particularly a lot of his claims

ending up in the speech that Colin Powell made before the U.N.. And

apparently, though, from the very beginning, the Germans were letting

our side know that the guy was a fabricator and was, in fact, crazy.

First of all, I didn't think the CIA relied that heavily upon foreign

intelligence. I thought there was a kind of professional sense that

our taxpayers give us $30 billion dollars a year, we should be able to

do this on our own and not rely on others. First of all, address that,

sort of, cultural question if you will.

 

Well, I think in the case of Iraq, there were special circumstances,

because the CIA does not have a good network of Iraqi sources in

place, even though Iraq had become the forefront of U.S. policy all

the way back to the Gulf War in 1991. So there was a dearth of

information coming from CIA's own sources. Secondly, there was an

awful lot of so-called information coming from Iraqi exiles, primarily

Ahmed Chalabi's INC—the Iraqi National Congress. And that seemed to

have a very receptive audience in some areas of the government,

particularly at the Defense Department and at the vice president's

office. These were reports that tended to support the preconception of

the administration that Saddam Hussein needed to be gotten rid of, and

the primary reason for doing that was that he was in imminent

possession of weapons of mass destruction, which could be turned

against the United States of America or its allies.

 

So in that kind of environment — where there's a tremendous policy

need for information and you don't have a great deal of source

information that's proprietary — then that's how information that

seems to be comprehensive, coming in from a foreign source, is

overemphasized.

 

Well, in this case, the Germans had told the CIA's head of the

European desk on the operations side, Tyler Drumheller, who I spoke

to, but he wasn't comfortable going on the radio. He was told by

Curveball's handlers in Germany that the guy was crazy and a

fabricator and the real question, I guess, is he passed this

information on to the top people inside the agency, the Deputy McLaughlin and the Director George Tenet, both of whom are

now — well, I don't know about McLaughlin. He works for CNN. But, I

believe George Tenet says he doesn't remember the conversation.

 

Well, I think there's no question that there's a sequence of events

that still remains a bit clouded, mainly because the report itself

indicts the whole incident as an egregious example of a failure of

intelligence.

 

To put it in some perspective, Curveball was an Iraqi chemical

engineer, who allegedly defected and showed up at a refugee camp in

Germany. He was then being exploited by German intelligence for

information. Allied countries to the United States had all been

alerted to the U.S. need for information on Iraq and on weapons of

mass destruction programs in Iraq. And so the Germans exploited this

information.

 

But the first cut of the information was passed to the DIA, not to the

CIA. That's the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon's

intelligence collection unit. And that information then was

disseminated by DIA to the CIA. So the CIA never had any direct access

to Curveball, a codename provided by the Germans to this defector

source. The interesting thing to me is that the only DIA analyst who

ever met with Curveball — who went to Germany and was given access to

him — came back with an assessment which was very, very negative.

 

The problem was: what happened to his assessment? It didn't get

reported up through the senior levels of DIA — and therefore it didn't

get disseminated to CIA — until the Germans were directly queried by

CIA on Curveball. That's when they said, " Look this guy may be a

fabricator, don't trust any of his information. " His information had

already gotten into the system, because it had been disseminated by

the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. And it had been

distributed through our government, where of course in some sectors —

particularly the Defense Department policymakers civilian policy

makers and at the vice president's office — it found an extremely

receptive audience.

 

It was believed because it fit the preconceptions of those policy

makers. Now, why did the CIA — which ultimately was responsible for

putting the National Intelligence Estimate together in 2002, which was

the most critical assessment of any intelligence report that the U.S.

government has to offer — put the information in there and play a part

in its key judgment of alleged WMD programs by Saddam Hussein? And

that's the question which is still not answered. We do know that some

of the analysts at CIA were very suspicious of the Curveball

information, as well as information provided by other so-called Iraqi

defectors in exile. But that information, that assessment, was

reported up through the chain of command at CIA, but apparently

nothing was done about it.

 

So nothing was done to dampen down the expectations of some of the

senior policymakers that this was genuine information. And it got

into, as we know, Secretary of State Colin Powell's address to the

United Nations Security Council — with disastrous results, because the

information was totally false. At the time, some analysts that I spoke

to were very critical of the information, but they were not able to

impress senior leadership, meaning George Tenet and John McLaughlin,

his deputy, with their doubts. Their doubts were never reflected,

either in Colin Powell's speech, or in the National Intelligence

Estimate itself.

 

The importance of the NIE, the National Intelligence Estimate, is that

that was the document upon which the senators made that vote — and of

course, the most fateful vote of all was John Kerry's vote — to

support the war, or to authorize the use of force.

 

Absolutely. The NIE is considered [the] most important intelligence

analysis that the U.S. government produces. It's supposed to reflect

the collective wisdom of the intelligence community on a particular

issue. And that's why, while it is supervised by a member of the

National Intelligence Council, which is at the CIA, all the

intelligence community members play a role in contributing to it. And

in this case, the minority opinions of some agencies, such as the

Department of Energy, Department of State, were relegated to minor

footnotes, which really didn't capture the attention of the reader of

the NIE itself. So, yes, the NIE — which as we know now was corrupted

by false intelligence and in some cases fabricated, deliberately

fabricated, information — it played a critical role in getting the

U.S. Senate to vote in favor of war with Iraq.

 

At the time, you were quoted in some articles as saying that you had

heard of dissent within the agency and people that were being, sort

of, steamrollered by the administration. Give us some sense of what

was happening at the time. Having spoken, again, with the key guy in

the agency, Tyler Drumheller, he said, he understood that on the

analysis side, there were people that actually either were fired or

who quit. Not so much on the operations side that he was a part of,

but on the analysis side there was some real frustration apparently.

 

Well, there was a tremendous amount of pressure on the analysts and

even though the Silberman-Robb report dismisses political pressure on

the process—they were not given that as an assignment by the

president—they weren't allowed ...

 

Well, that wouldn't ... you couldn't ... we shouldn't be surprised by

that.

 

No, we're not surprised by it. But, the point is that it's being taken

as conventional wisdom that there really wasn't any pressure by policy

makers on the analytical process itself. And that's just simply not

true. It's simply not true because analysts, generally, are like

anyone else. They are concerned about their careers, their futures.

Many of them are ambitious. If they understand that a dissenting

opinion against the conventional policy wisdom is heard, that it's

going to affect their careers. There was a chilled environment in

which to express any kind of opposite opinion.

 

Not only that, there wasn't very much of a receptiveness at the senior

levels of the CIA — at George Tenet's level, for example, because he

was a very political director. And he was very concerned about getting

along with the administration. He was formerly a Democrat, appointed

by a Democratic President and he had to stay on in a Republican

administration. And he had to compete with a secretary of defense,

Rumsfeld, who really didn't want the CIA playing a large role in the

intelligence community, and wanted to supplant that role. So, George

had a more political bent. He wanted to get along, and therefore he

had to play along. And " playing along " really meant to sustain the

conceptions of the policy makers — particularly at the Pentagon and

the vice president's office — that Saddam Hussein was a real and

imminent danger.

 

To do that, you had to accept some of these alarming reports that kept

coming in, being fed by Ahmed Chalabi and his INC group. In many

cases, the information was fabricated. Information, for example, about

an alleged attempt by Saddam Hussein to acquire nuclear material,

uranium, from Niger. This, we know now, was all based on fabricated

documents. But it's not clear yet — either from this report, or from

any other report — who fabricated the documents.

 

The documents were fabricated by supporters of the policy in the

United States. The policy being that you had to invade Iraq in order

to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and you had to do it soon to avoid the

catastrophe that would be produced by Saddam Hussein's use of alleged

weapons of mass destruction.

 

Well, Ambassador Wilson publicly refuted the claims — particularly the

16 words in the President's State of the Union address that the Iraqis

were trying to buy significant quantities of uranium from Niger. That

document, I understand, was fabricated ... it originally came out of

Italian intelligence, I think SISME, or SISDE—I'm not sure which one.

 

It was SISME, yeah. ...

 

[D]uring the two-thousands when we're talking about acquiring

information on Iraq. It isn't that anyone had a good source on

Iraq—there weren't any good sources. The Italian intelligence service,

the military intelligence service, was acquiring information that was

really being hand-fed to them by very dubious sources. The Niger

documents, for example, which apparently were produced in the United

States, yet were funneled through the Italians.

 

Do we know who produced those documents? Because there's some

suspicion ...

 

I think I do, but I'd rather not speak about it right now, because I

don't think it's a proven case ...

 

If I said " Michael Ledeen " ?

 

You'd be very close . . .

 

Well, again, Vincent Cannistraro, the feeling you get is that, from

going back to, let's agree that 9/11 is the greatest intelligence

catastrophe since Pearl Harbor, and then the WMD catastrophe that

followed it. These are two huge embarrassments and it seems to be that

the way the White House has handled it's as though you have a car

accident. And instead of blaming the driver, you are blaming the car

here. So, do you believe that, you know, that this process — whether

it was the intention or not — it's certainly worked out in such a way

to exonerate the White House and to lay the blame with the wrong . . .

 

I think that's certainly the objective. To lay it off to the

intelligence community. But, it's very disingenuous. It's like saying,

OK, the intelligence community that we whipped into a frenzy in order

to provide information to sustain our policy conclusions that Saddam

had a WMD program and that he was an imminent danger — that

intelligence community provided information that now turns out not to

be correct. And that's why we were misled into saying what we did say,

and doing what we did do. That's very disingenuous, because that's not

the case at all.

 

The case was that this was not a fact-based policy that the U.S.

government adopted. It was a policy-based decision that drove the

intelligence, and not the other way around. And that's, of course, the

reverse of the process. You had a lot of people who played along to

get along, and they understood that in that kind of administration,

you couldn't say exactly what it is that you really believed.

 

Now, having said all that, it's not to exonerate the intelligence

community, because, clearly, there were major gaps. And I think the

major gap was the failure of, specifically, the CIA and the DIA to

develop their own proprietary Iraqi sources that could be in a

position to give them the kind of information they really needed —

rather than having this dependence on foreign sources that you did not

have direct access to. There's nothing wrong in dealing with a liaison

and sharing information. But, to be utterly a hundred percent — not

100 percent, let's say, but 98 percent — dependent on such sources is

a telling criticism of the American intelligence community for having

failed to recognize that this was a priority that they needed to

develop sources on. They had plenty of time to do it. They didn't do

it. And, again, you see some of this married in some of the other

intelligence failures, such as 9/11 and the failure to penetrate al

Qaeda. The problem really began when there was no appreciation for

what al Qaeda was. That it was a threat. And I think that's the same

rationale that drove the Iraqi programs as well.

 

This particular White House coined the phrase " the axis of evil, "

naming Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and it's worth noting that we

didn't have any diplomatic relations with all three of those countries

Then, Iran, where there's rumors of war, in terms of some pre-emption

against their developing nuclear weapons. North Korea, estimates are

that they had maybe two, now since they've been reprocessing fuel rods

for plutonium, they have up to six. Again, we don't have any

representation. So, isn't that the heart of the problem, that you've

got all the overhead collections from the satellites, but, unless you

have people on the ground, you're flying blind. And it gets to the

real question, which is why do we have this foreign policy rigidity

here, where we don't recognize these countries. I mean, couldn't you

just recognize these countries just for the sake of getting people in

there?

 

Well, I mean, it's a good point. The question is the areas where we

are very deficient on in terms of understanding the societies and

understanding the policy decisions that are being made in those

societies are areas where we have no official representation. We have

no real official dialog. And that is part of the problem. In that kind

of absence of contact, you're really susceptible to people who have

their own agenda, primarily exiles.

 

North Korea is an example where we don't know in the U.S. government

how many weapons they may have. There are estimates which range from

four — which is the last one I've seen at the CIA — to 14, which comes

out of DIA. That's a huge disparity in estimate. And it just really

tells you that we just don't have solid information. And when you

don't, how do you devise a rational policy to deal with those

countries. And I think the one spin-off from the Silberman-Robb report

— as well as other reports that were made by the Senate and the

National Commission on Terrorism — will be to cast doubt on the basis

of any aggressive policies that the Bush administration takes against

Iran, in particular, over the next few years.

 

Ian Masters is the host of the radio programs Background Briefing

(Sundays from 11am - 12 noon) and Live From the Left coast (Sundays

from 12 noon - 1pm), heard on KPFK 90.7FM Los Angeles. The full

transcript and mp3 audio of the Vincent Cannistraro interview is

available at IanMasters.org.