Chasing Shadows
In the summer of 2003, I was one of around 1,200 American, British, and Australian intelligence personnel sent to Baghdad to form the Iraq Survey Group (ISG). The task of this unprecedented field intelligence operation was simple: locate the Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) that had sufficiently worried President Bush and Prime Minister Blair that they ordered an invasion without a UN mandate.
The commanders in Washington and London had expected the invading troops to be barraged by chemical weapons deployed on 45-minutes notice, with caches of WMD scattered all over the place. US troops were inoculated against smallpox and we all got the Doxycycline pre-treatment that doubled as anthrax and malaria preventatives.
By the time President Bush declared Operation Iraqi Freedom “mission accomplished” on 1 May 2003, no WMD had been used, no stockpiles discovered, and no covert or mobile production facilities uncovered.
With surprising speed, the ISG was formed in less than a month, under the command of the DIA’s Major-General Keith Dayton. Most of the ISG personnel were drawn from US intelligence agencies (CIA, DIA, NSA, and many others), but our ranks also included experts from the UK MoD Defence Intelligence Staff, the Defence laboratories at Porton Down, case officers from UKSIS, and a handful of military and civilian analysts from the Australian Defence Intelligence Organisation. We were stationed at “Camp Slayer,” which was an incomplete palace complex on the edge of Baghdad International Airport. We were protected and supported by a small army of contractors, US military, and paramilitary troops.
Although many HUMINT collectors were deployed, the majority of the ISG staff were technical experts and desk analysts from a variety of all-source agencies and departments, supplemented by security-cleared translators supplied by US defence contractors. For many, this was their first exposure to the harsh reality of information-gathering and for some it was a unique opportunity to vindicate their own pre-war assessments.
The ISG represented a massive investment in the pursuit of answers, as hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on an enormous operation that spoke to the extent of surprise at the absence of WMD.
The ISG began by revisiting a list of known sites that had already been turned over by the invading US and UK armies, the 75th Expeditionary Task Force (75 XTF), the Mobile Exploitation Teams (METs), special forces Task Force TF 20, and others. This was in addition to UNMOVIC inspections immediately preceding the war.
By the end of June, the ISG had found the same nothing as everyone else, so we changed focus, and evolved into a HUMINT-driven search for scientists, generals, and other sources. Inevitably, the CIA increasingly dominated the ISG agenda, as we faced the near-impossible task of finding thousands of individuals amid the chaos of looting and under threat of a rising insurgency.
In October 2003, the ISG issued an Interim Report on our findings, and it was clear the WMD threat had been a complete mirage.
How could the vast, well-funded and outcome-orientated Western intelligence apparatus have been so very wrong?
What had gone wrong?
Just about everything, it turned out.
A group-think mentality had predominated pre-war analysis, and it was simply the accepted wisdom in the intelligence and policy community that Saddam had WMD. All intelligence was interpreted through that lens. We failed to challenge theories whenever new facts did not fit and facts were interpreted to fit theories. Even the initial absence of proof was only assessed to mean that evidence was hidden or moved.
There was also a loss of objectivity in the collection of information, as we all forgot to be sceptical about incoming information if it suited our theory. We seemed to forget that people tell lies. Sources lied to intelligence officers because they knew what we wanted to hear. Worse, we forgot that people lie to each other. Even though technical wizardry enabled us to eavesdrop on calls between Saddam and, say, a top general or a scientist, one or both could still be lying to the other, oblivious to our presence. It was said that some of Saddam’s key scientists had been lying to him about weapons research for personal gain or out of self-preservation.
Iraq had been subject to more than a decade of UN sanctions since the first Gulf War in 1991. However imperfect these measures had appeared, they had actually succeeded in strangling any ambitions to reconstitute the strategic weapons programmes.
So, like Orion in the underworld, we were chasing the shadows of things that had been killed long before.
Will Erikson is the author of Found, published by Fisher King.