Chalabigate
"Weapons of Mass Deception"
2004-05-30
Iraqi defectors tricked us with WMD lies, but we must not be fooled again
Media coverage of Iraq is now the subject of fierce debate and last week the New York Times issued an extraordinary apology for some of its journalism. The Observer's David Rose, whose own stories have provoked controversy, argues that hidden agendas on all sides can still distort reporting
Sunday May 30, 2004
The Observer
The event which cost Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, the protection of his former allies in the Pentagon can be timed exactly - 19 February this year, when the Daily Telegraph suggested that if his group had supplied inaccurate claims about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction to the American government, Chalabi was proud of it. 'As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important,' he was quoted as saying. 'We are heroes in error.' His words, an INC spokesman said yesterday, were not meant to be taken seriously. But the damage was done. 'Many of us admire him,' a senior administration official said. 'But that interview put his admirers on the defensive.'
Three months after the story was published came the US-sponsored search of Chalabi's Baghdad home and the INC's office, amid claims by sources in the CIA that he and his intelligence chief, Arras Karim, leaked US secrets to Tehran.
Full disclosure: in the 18 months before the invasion of March 2003, I dealt regularly with Chalabi and the INC and published stories based on interviews with men they said were defectors from Saddam's regime, both in The Observer and in Vanity Fair. Some of what they said, especially about human rights abuses, has proved accurate. But other claims, such as details of Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction which I heard in the Jordanian capital Amman from a man called Mohamed Harith, were false - well-researched lies told by someone desperate for refuge in the West. At worst, they were the product of a calculated set-up, devised to foster the propaganda case for war.
The INC continues to deny this charge: its resources, its spokesman said, could only establish that defectors were who they said they were, not that their stories were true - that was the job of the journalists and intelligence agencies. This wasn't my impression at the time. Moreover, the fact that I went to several experts who assessed the defectors' stories as credible does not make me feel much better. It is possible that these experts' views, unbeknown to them, were ultimately derived from the same, tainted sources: in effect, they were an echo chamber.
But if - and for the moment I believe it remains an if - Chalabi and the INC were peddling deliberate disinformation at Iran's behest, they will not have been the only organisation playing such games. Those of us bamboozled by INC defectors are 'fessing up' - most notably in the soul-searching editorial in last week's New York Times . Yet even as we do, other myths, being sold by sources with questionable agendas, are assuming the status of unchallenged fact.
First, the claim that it was the INC that supplied all or nearly all the intelligence on WMD. In Britain, the opposite is true: MI6 policy was to dismiss any information from INC sources. Most of the claims in Tony Blair's fateful dossier of September 2002 were reheated conclusions from the final report of Unscom, the UN inspection team, in January 1999. The most sensational new assertion, that Iraq could deploy WMD in 45 minutes, came from Iraq's new Prime Minister-designate, Iyad Allawi.
In America, the INC's role was more significant. Its defectors persuaded the Pentagon to accept false claims - disputed by some in the CIA - that captured aluminium tubes were destined to make nuclear centrifuges and that Saddam had mobile biological weapons labs. But even here, at least 80 per cent of what Colin Powell used to make the case for war at the UN Security Council in February last year had been generated by ordinary intelligence procedures and had nothing to do with the INC. CIA director George Tenet told President Bush the WMD case was a 'slam dunk'. If CIA sources now seem keen on the idea that the whole inaccurate business was down to an INC-Iranian conspiracy, it is not hard to see a motive.
One of the most contentious claims is the story about an 'intelligence cell' in the Pentagon called the 'Office of Special Plans'. Its job, it was widely reported, was to debrief INC defectors, 'cherrypick' this and other intelligence about WMD, and 'stovepipe' it direct to Vice-President Dick Cheney, bypassing the intelligence community. The OSP was thought to have been run by ideologically motivated neo-conservatives calling themselves 'the cabal'.
This may not be true. The OSP had nothing to do with producing intelligence and its real job - for which it can be severely criticised - was planning Iraq's postwar future. All the stories about it appear to share a single source, Karen Kwiatkowski, a now-retired lieutenant colonel who worked in the Pentagon - but not in the OSP - on North Africa. So how would she know what went on there? The answer she gave me was that she regularly had 'conversations in the hallway' with someone who did, an official called John Trigilio. Trigilio denied any such conversations took place, saying neither he nor his colleagues ever met an INC defector. Why would Kwiatkowski make it up? On the one hand, she has written for Pat Buchanan's extreme right-wing journal, the American Conservative, and described herself to me as a 'conservative anarchist'. Meanwhile, her story first surfaced - with her name concealed - in a dubious outlet: the Executive Intelligence Review, a virulently anti-semitic magazine run by conspiracy theorist, Lyndon LaRouche.
Kwiatkowski told me she admired LaRouche's work and admitted giving his editor, Jeff Steinberg, an interview. However, she also needed an echo chamber. She got one in Patrick Lang, former Middle East chief of the Defence Intelligence Agency, who supplied quotes endorsing her story. He sent an email to several journalists, enclosing the transcript of the Kwiatkowski-Steinberg interview. 'Jeff Steinberg is a first-rate scholar,' Lang wrote. 'I am not concerned where he works.'
Lang popped up again, last week with the claim that he had learnt from his associates that Chalabi and his defectors were an Iranian intelligence scam, 'one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history'.
I assume Lang, who is widely admired in Washington, would not knowingly disseminate inaccurate information. But it is possible his political beliefs may make him credulous. The Pentagon, he said, had been seized by extremists, 'Zionist revisionists', whose goal was to 'de-Arabise' the Middle East. Ariel Sharon's Likud party had in effect directed America's invasion of Iraq, and the way to visualise Likud's power was as 'a steel barbell, with one ball in Israel and another in the Pentagon, among the neo-conservatives'.
Now, with the war fought and Iraq on the brink of catastrophe, does any of this matter? It does: for the propaganda battles continue to resonate politically. Disinformation helped to drag Britain and America into a war. It is vital it does not become a significant factor in the attempts to prevent an Iraqi disaster now.
The information fog is thicker than in any previous war, as I know now from bitter personal experience. To any journalist being offered apparently sensational disclosures, especially from an anonymous intelligence source, I offer two words of advice: caveat emptor.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1227862,00.html
This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
Sunday May 30, 2004
The Observer
The event which cost Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, the protection of his former allies in the Pentagon can be timed exactly - 19 February this year, when the Daily Telegraph suggested that if his group had supplied inaccurate claims about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction to the American government, Chalabi was proud of it. 'As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important,' he was quoted as saying. 'We are heroes in error.' His words, an INC spokesman said yesterday, were not meant to be taken seriously. But the damage was done. 'Many of us admire him,' a senior administration official said. 'But that interview put his admirers on the defensive.'
Three months after the story was published came the US-sponsored search of Chalabi's Baghdad home and the INC's office, amid claims by sources in the CIA that he and his intelligence chief, Arras Karim, leaked US secrets to Tehran.
Full disclosure: in the 18 months before the invasion of March 2003, I dealt regularly with Chalabi and the INC and published stories based on interviews with men they said were defectors from Saddam's regime, both in The Observer and in Vanity Fair. Some of what they said, especially about human rights abuses, has proved accurate. But other claims, such as details of Saddam's supposed weapons of mass destruction which I heard in the Jordanian capital Amman from a man called Mohamed Harith, were false - well-researched lies told by someone desperate for refuge in the West. At worst, they were the product of a calculated set-up, devised to foster the propaganda case for war.
The INC continues to deny this charge: its resources, its spokesman said, could only establish that defectors were who they said they were, not that their stories were true - that was the job of the journalists and intelligence agencies. This wasn't my impression at the time. Moreover, the fact that I went to several experts who assessed the defectors' stories as credible does not make me feel much better. It is possible that these experts' views, unbeknown to them, were ultimately derived from the same, tainted sources: in effect, they were an echo chamber.
But if - and for the moment I believe it remains an if - Chalabi and the INC were peddling deliberate disinformation at Iran's behest, they will not have been the only organisation playing such games. Those of us bamboozled by INC defectors are 'fessing up' - most notably in the soul-searching editorial in last week's New York Times . Yet even as we do, other myths, being sold by sources with questionable agendas, are assuming the status of unchallenged fact.
First, the claim that it was the INC that supplied all or nearly all the intelligence on WMD. In Britain, the opposite is true: MI6 policy was to dismiss any information from INC sources. Most of the claims in Tony Blair's fateful dossier of September 2002 were reheated conclusions from the final report of Unscom, the UN inspection team, in January 1999. The most sensational new assertion, that Iraq could deploy WMD in 45 minutes, came from Iraq's new Prime Minister-designate, Iyad Allawi.
In America, the INC's role was more significant. Its defectors persuaded the Pentagon to accept false claims - disputed by some in the CIA - that captured aluminium tubes were destined to make nuclear centrifuges and that Saddam had mobile biological weapons labs. But even here, at least 80 per cent of what Colin Powell used to make the case for war at the UN Security Council in February last year had been generated by ordinary intelligence procedures and had nothing to do with the INC. CIA director George Tenet told President Bush the WMD case was a 'slam dunk'. If CIA sources now seem keen on the idea that the whole inaccurate business was down to an INC-Iranian conspiracy, it is not hard to see a motive.
One of the most contentious claims is the story about an 'intelligence cell' in the Pentagon called the 'Office of Special Plans'. Its job, it was widely reported, was to debrief INC defectors, 'cherrypick' this and other intelligence about WMD, and 'stovepipe' it direct to Vice-President Dick Cheney, bypassing the intelligence community. The OSP was thought to have been run by ideologically motivated neo-conservatives calling themselves 'the cabal'.
This may not be true. The OSP had nothing to do with producing intelligence and its real job - for which it can be severely criticised - was planning Iraq's postwar future. All the stories about it appear to share a single source, Karen Kwiatkowski, a now-retired lieutenant colonel who worked in the Pentagon - but not in the OSP - on North Africa. So how would she know what went on there? The answer she gave me was that she regularly had 'conversations in the hallway' with someone who did, an official called John Trigilio. Trigilio denied any such conversations took place, saying neither he nor his colleagues ever met an INC defector. Why would Kwiatkowski make it up? On the one hand, she has written for Pat Buchanan's extreme right-wing journal, the American Conservative, and described herself to me as a 'conservative anarchist'. Meanwhile, her story first surfaced - with her name concealed - in a dubious outlet: the Executive Intelligence Review, a virulently anti-semitic magazine run by conspiracy theorist, Lyndon LaRouche.
Kwiatkowski told me she admired LaRouche's work and admitted giving his editor, Jeff Steinberg, an interview. However, she also needed an echo chamber. She got one in Patrick Lang, former Middle East chief of the Defence Intelligence Agency, who supplied quotes endorsing her story. He sent an email to several journalists, enclosing the transcript of the Kwiatkowski-Steinberg interview. 'Jeff Steinberg is a first-rate scholar,' Lang wrote. 'I am not concerned where he works.'
Lang popped up again, last week with the claim that he had learnt from his associates that Chalabi and his defectors were an Iranian intelligence scam, 'one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history'.
I assume Lang, who is widely admired in Washington, would not knowingly disseminate inaccurate information. But it is possible his political beliefs may make him credulous. The Pentagon, he said, had been seized by extremists, 'Zionist revisionists', whose goal was to 'de-Arabise' the Middle East. Ariel Sharon's Likud party had in effect directed America's invasion of Iraq, and the way to visualise Likud's power was as 'a steel barbell, with one ball in Israel and another in the Pentagon, among the neo-conservatives'.
Now, with the war fought and Iraq on the brink of catastrophe, does any of this matter? It does: for the propaganda battles continue to resonate politically. Disinformation helped to drag Britain and America into a war. It is vital it does not become a significant factor in the attempts to prevent an Iraqi disaster now.
The information fog is thicker than in any previous war, as I know now from bitter personal experience. To any journalist being offered apparently sensational disclosures, especially from an anonymous intelligence source, I offer two words of advice: caveat emptor.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1227862,00.html
This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
Milton Frihetsson, 20:10
