The Rest Is Classified - 153. The Road to Iraq: Weapons of Mass Destruction (Ep 1)

Episode Date: May 3, 2026

How did Saddam Hussein become one of history’s most notorious dictators? How did the Iran-Iraq war begin? And what really happened to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction? Listen as David and Gordon begin their 6-part series on one of history’s biggest intelligence failures: Iraq WMD. ------------------- THE REST IS CLASSIFIED LIVE 2026 at The Rest Is Fest: Buy your tickets ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to see David and Gordon live on stage at London’s Southbank Centre on 4 September: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/the-rest-is-classified-live/⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Sign-up for our free newsletter where producer Becki takes you behind the scenes of the show: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign⁠-up⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ------------------- Join the Declassified Club to go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- Get a 10% discount on business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC10. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://HP.com/CLASSIFIED⁠⁠⁠⁠ for more information. T&C's apply. ------------------- Email: ⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified⁠ Video Editor: Vasco Andrade Social Producer: Emma Jackson Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books. Join the Declassified Club at the Rest is Classified.com. A war in the Middle East over weapons of mass destruction. But what is the truth behind the Iraq War? I don't remember an analytic failure in the history of CIA that was littered with so many analytic biases. as Iraq WMD. On Tuesday night, I gave the order for British forces to take part in military action in Iraq.

Their mission? To remove Saddam Hussein from power and disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. Occasionally, I do think, you know, did we get played a bit by the Americans? He's relying on what they are told. The spies were the ones who got it wrong, rather than the politicians lying about it. I do see his intelligence failure. If you look at Iraq now, I would argue strongly. There was a justification for the company.

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The rest is classified listeners also benefit from 10% off HP business technology with code T-R-I-C-10. A war in the Middle East over weapons of mass destruction. But what is the truth behind the Iraq War of 2003? Well, welcome to the Rest is Classified. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera. And today we are starting a big series on a very big subject.

The war in Iraq started in 2003. I think it's fair to say was one of the most controversial, consequential decisions that the U.S. and the U.K. have made in recent history. And it's arguably one of the most important geopolitical events of the last. 25 to 50 years. And we are going to be looking in this six-part series at the road to that conflict, and in particular the intelligence case that was made to sell that war. We've got another war in the Middle East in Iran between, in this case, the US and Israel on one side and Iran. But the echoes of Iraq are still there, the legacy of Iraq, of what happened, of what went wrong, of the questions about intelligence.

the questions about alliances. You know, it's all there still, I think, because of what happened in Iraq. Iraq itself was just such a seismic event, I think, for the U.S. and UK, and particularly their intelligence communities, wasn't it, David? It's one of those events that looking back on it, you can tie so much of what's going on in the world today in some way, shape, or form back to this decision to go to war in Iraq. We're recording this in the middle of Operation Epic.

I guess a ceasefire-ish in the middle of Operation Epic Fury. But do you have this war in Iran without the 2003 invasion of Iraq? I think you can make a pretty good case that you don't. That's one of the major consequences of this 2003 invasion of Iraq is that you have a Middle East that is totally reshaped and in fact reshaped in ways that makes it much easier for the Iranians to exert power and influence. throughout the region. And so many of the things that have led us to this conflict with Iran, you probably don't have if the United States doesn't remove Saddam Hussein from power in 2003. Another significant, I think, implication of this conflict in Iraq is it directly leads to a power vacuum in Iraq, which leads to the rise of what will eventually become the Islamic states,

which will, of course, spread throughout the region, spread into Syria. lead to state collapse and, you know, sort of destabilized power centers all over the Middle East and a bunch of terrorist attacks and activity, all of these things that have become woven into the fabric of our world today lead back in many ways to this fateful decision to invade Iraq in the spring of 2003. Yeah, that's right. You know, you've got the impact on Iraq itself where hundreds of thousands die. You have the impact on the region, as you said, you have the the spurring of terrorism and of the rise of groups like ISIS, you know, in the Middle East, but also radicalisation beyond, you get the impact then on US and UK policy and politics.

I mean, the US multiple presidencies get mired in how to deal with the aftermath of Iraq. And it changes the appetite and the way in which I think the US and UK intervene as you get insurgency in Iraq. And of course, it has a huge impact politically. in ways which I think you can't underestimate. The implications for Tony Blair's premiership, the decisions about whether or not to intervene in future conflicts, you know, even the rise of Donald Trump, a lot of that is about intervention, non-intervention, all of that, the shadow of Iraq hanging over it all. Yeah, it cost a couple trillion dollars with a T. As you said, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, little over 4,000 U.S. service members killed in this

conflict. And I think one of the other pieces of this story just has massive impacts on the way the U.S. conducts foreign policy is that this is a moment where I think large portions eventually with how the justification for the war, spoiler alert, turned out to be not so great. This is a moment where I think much of the American population lost faith in the ability of its leadership and its foreign policy establishment to make sound decisions. And so you see this reflected in the trust that Americans have in institutions of government, and in particular in intelligence agencies and national security institutions. A lot of this goes back to the way the Iraq war was sold, the justification for it,

which turned out to be totally, totally wrong in many ways. Yeah. I mean, that's right, because the war was really. really predicated on one issue, the existence of weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist. Now, we're going to look at the real reasons for war and the extent to which weapons of mass destruction, WMD, to give them their shorthand, really was the reason and the motive as opposed to the justification for it. But it certainly was the reason the public were told the US and UK were going to war. You know, this was a war.

which was in public terms based on intelligence. So when it comes to the fact that, as you said, spoiler alert, they don't exist, this is an intelligence failure and a question of intelligence, which has huge meaning for the intelligence community because it raises deep questions about why and how they got it wrong. We really want to kind of grapple with that issue of why we were told there were weapons of mass of and they weren't there. This story is not going to reflect well on my old cadre, Gordon, at the CIA, the analysts,

the Biddy McCloskey's, because what you were going to get over the next six episodes is a masterclass in analytic biases and how a group of very, very smart people can come to a conclusion that is completely incorrect. Playing the highest stakes game and you get it entirely wrong. And yet, as we'll see, most of the people involved in this story, Operation side, the collectors, the analysts, the policy makers even, these are not dumb people. And yet they make a phenomenally incorrect assessment of, what's going on inside Iraq.

And what I think is interesting is when you look at this as an intelligence failure, you're right, there's a failure of analysis, but there is also a failure of collection. And I think a failure in the interface, in the relationship between intelligence agencies and politicians, which is really interesting, I think. There is a kind of narrative that the politician simply lied and made up to stuff about WMD. That's not quite right. But something went wrong in the way intelligence and politics mixed. And I think what's great,

isn't it, David, is that we've got this six-part series, but alongside it for club members, we've got some really interesting interviews with people who were directly involved in that relationship. We've got a guy called Alastair Campbell, who might be a name

familiar to those who listen to Goldhanger pods for our sister podcast. The rest is politics. And Alistair, we should remind people, was Tony Blair's director of communications through this period. and is going to kind of take us through what it was like in the room with presidents and prime ministers making that decision. We've also got Sir Richard Dearlob, who was the head of MI6 at the time, and also deeply involved in the intelligence case. And we've got a representative.

I wouldn't forget the Americans, would we, David? We would not, because we will also have Michael Morel, who was the former acting director of the agency, former deputy director as well, and in this period around Iraq WMD, was one of the deputies to the head of the Directorate of Intelligence at CIA. And so was intimately involved in the process of coming up with all of the analytic judgments, in particular around kind of the post-Saddam Iraq terrorism and connections to Saddam, but really has an inside scoop as well on the WMD story and how the analyst got it entirely wrong and what happened in this connection between policy

and intelligence that I think is so fascinating. Yeah, that's right. So that will be for club members. So if you're not a club member, do sign up at the rest is classified.com where you'll be able to hear those interviews and also binge, get through all six episodes, whenever you want of this series.

Well, the other great part about this story, Gordon, which does cheer my former CIA heart, is that, of course, this is also an intelligence failure that sprawls across the Atlantic. It's also a case study of how that liaison relationship can go haywire as well and in some ways contribute to a lot of these analytic failures on both sides of the Atlantic. This in particular, this space has been a particular interest to you, Gordon. I'd go as far to say a bit of an obsession because I was a young journalist at the time. I'm very young, David, before you ask.

But covering the run up to war. 17 or 18 years old. Yeah, 17 or 18 years old. In my 20s, to be fair. But it did mean I went to Northern Iraq. I was kind of talking to some of the spies and defectors and people like that. I made a big series for the BBC on the 20th anniversary. But actually, this series that we're doing is a bit of a chance to drill much deeper into the intelligence issues in a way that I've never done.

before and which I found really fascinating to really grapple with how things went wrong when it came to that intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. And the key question about just why was such a big mistake made and what lay behind it. So I think the key question that we'll be evaluating in this series is why we were told that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction in the run up to the 2003 war. What is that statement? Is it a lie, an outright lie? Is it an exaggeration? Is it a mistake? Is it the result of political pressure on intelligence agencies to come up with the reason for the war? I think kind of coming back to that question or framing this entire series in the context of that question. But I think maybe

the place to start is not with the intelligence agencies, but it's with the fascinating character of Saddam Hussein himself because so many of the questions in the series revolve around what's going on in the mind of Saddam Hussein, what's going on in his government. And he is going to be an important and central character in our series because the answer to those questions revolves around his actions and personality. So you'll be pleased that we're going back to the beginning of Saddam Hussein. We're going to do some, a pop psychology portrait of. of the man who will come to rule Iraq. Saddam Hussein, born in 1937, near Tukrit in the middle of

Iraq, which is north of the capital of Baghdad, born to this poor rural family in a place where violence was common. Now, there was a local saying that when the Tukrites turn up in nearby towns, shopkeepers close up because they know there'll be trouble, they'll be looting. So Tukrites are the kind of roughers side of town, and Saddam has a tough upbringing, even in the world of Tecrete. His father dies three months before he's born. His mother is quite odd, by all accounts. She is a clairvoyant or a psychic who uses seashells, which she keeps in her pockets, to tell people their future. After her husband's death, so Saddam's father's death, she's depressed. Supposedly she tries to actually kill herself at one point or abort the unborn

Saddam Hussein but fails. And then after he's born, she marries her dead husband's brother. So already, I think it's fair to say, doing our pop psychology, that's a pretty weird upbringing. This whole sequence on his upbringing reminded me of the speech from Austin Powers that Dr. Evil gives about his childhood where he, it's something along the lines of, you know, my childhood was typical. Summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring, we'd make meat helmets. When I was insolent, I was placed in a burlap bag. and beaten with reeds. Pretty standard, really. Yeah.

We're not very far into this series, and we've already got some threads that psychologists would pull on for all time. Yeah, and we love a bit of pop psychology. So, Saddam will claim that his stepfather beats him regularly just to wake him up in the morning, although some people deny that that might have happened. Young Saddam gets involved inevitably in petty thie, and other kids have a go at him at school, because his dad is dead and his mother is odd. is using seashells to tell the future.

Yeah, so it's not a great start in life. And by one account, this all means he learns to use the threat of violence with other kids. And this include intimidating them when they're bullying him by brandishing a real gun. It is pop psychology, but one way of understanding Saddam and this issue of weapons of mass destruction is picturing this little kid who thinks the best way of not getting beaten up is by brandishing a weapon and looking tough. Which I would say is probably pretty effective. Yeah.

It reminded me, I guess, of Pablo Escobar a little bit in terms of the early descent into petty, fevery, and violence. Maybe a little bit of Vladimir Putin's upbringing. Yeah, tough upbringing. Very tough upbringing in these kind of lawless courtyards in post-war St. Petersburg. Or I guess also of Stalin, who I guess drops out of seminary. I'm skipping some parts, becomes a bankrupt. and gets into Bolshevism through the sort of the avenue of crime and banditry. Saddam has some similar vibes with other friends at the pod.

Yeah, normal people don't end up becoming drug lords and tyrants. I think that's what we're saying. But when he's 10, he leaves home, young Saddam, and he heads to Baghdad to live with his uncle. Now, that uncle was big in politics. He's an Arab nationalist. He'd been involved in fighting against the Brits, and we'll come back to them. Adam is close to this uncle. He marries the uncle's daughter, so a cousin, Sajida. He's supposedly devoted to, although later on he'll take another wife. And the uncle sets him on the path to politics.

So aged around 20, young Saddam, who's not academic, but is street smart, certainly, drops out of law school and joins something called the Bath Party like his uncle. Maybe you should explain what the Bath Party is. The Bath Party. One of my favorite topics, because there was a Bath Party in Syria. And so I had to spend a lot of time, Gordon, when I was at the CIA thinking about the Bath Party. And in fact, had a friend on the Syria account who had a paper ready to go for the day when Assad collapsed called Curtains for the Bath Party. But he never, I don't think he actually got to use that title at the end. So Bath Party, Bath, it's Arabic for Renaissance. It is a blend of nationalism, kind of anti-colonialism. Bath parties take root

across the Arab world in the, you know, sort of really in the 50s and 60s, it predates this, but in the 50s and 60s is kind of this anti-colonial trend sweeping the Middle East. It's secularism, it's socialism, right? Not communism, that's an important distinction, not communism or Marxism, but a kind of state-led and state-centric development. The ostensible goal is to turn the Arab world into a single state, but, but, you know, But that doesn't quite happen. And as a result, by the time, you know, Saddam would be joining it, you would have bath parties, different branches in different countries around the Arab world,

in Iraq and Syria, in particular, and they end up in sort of vicious conflict with one another. Thank you for that explainer. So in Iraq, I guess we should just, the specific context of Iraq, is it become independent from Britain in the 30s, ruled over initially by a Hashemite monarchy, so the same family that the Brits also put in charge in Jordan, and they're still there in Jordan, but in Iraq, in 1958 there's a military coup and Iraq becomes a republic. And the Baathists are kind of in the mix at that point, but they do not like the fact that Iraq's then Prime Minister is flirting with some communists. And so there's a plot by the Ba'ath Party to assassinate Iraq's Prime Minister in 1959. Now, interestingly enough, there are claims that the CIA might have

had some role in this, because would you believe that those devious Machiavellian types of the CIA might engage in plots against people who are flirting with communists? Not in the 50s, for sure. No. No way. Just amazingly, it just seemed to have happened in Guatemala and Iran, according to previous series we've done. And so there's no kind of hard proof for it, but it's not implausible anyway, the CIA have a little flirtation with the Baffis at this point. But the plan is it's an assassination plan against Iraq's Prime Minister and Saddam is part of the team, but he's a late arrival to the team and he doesn't seem to be well trained. They're going to

ambush the Prime Minister's car. The story is Saddam, because he's, you know, a bit hot-headed, shoots early, too early, and it screws the whole thing up and the Prime Minister's driver is killed, but not the Prime Minister. And Saddam himself gets shot in the leg. He then has to escape from this failed assassination attempt. The legend is he swims across the Tigris River to escape. He goes on the run, hiding in a farm, and eventually flees the country making his way to Cairo, where he then embeds himself in a world of kind of exiles and plotting. And actually, one of the things I did was make a documentary.

I produced a documentary for the BBC about the kind of making of Saddam Hussein in his early days. We actually went to Cairo, and we managed to track down. someone from Egyptian intelligence who could recall Saddam Hussein as a young man and he said he was always plotting. He was plotting, plotting, always plotting. But anyway, in

1963, the Barthists then launch another coup to take over the country. Again, does the CIA help the Barthists? Maybe, who knows? I mean, one of the interesting questions about that is of course neither side would want to admit it later if there had been some help

because it doesn't look great for the CIA. It doesn't look great for the Bathurst to be helping each other. But whatever it is, Saddam comes back from exile. There's more plotting. There's more coups. I think what you get in this period, though, with all this plotting, is Saddam learning that you've got to be ruthless to take power and then hold onto it and be suspicious of everyone.

So that's another core part of his personality. And so by 1968 is the number two. guy in the country, he's ridden this train of coups and plotting to a very high position. Saddam actually told one of his friends that he deliberately stayed behind the scenes to concentrate on building a secret security and intelligence network. That makes sense that tracks with how you become effective in a political environment where power is rotating constantly and it's really unstable. So that's a level of sort of learning and intelligence and comprehension.

that I think he has about how you take and hold power in this kind of system. Yeah. And then July 17th, 1979, 11th anniversary of the revolution, the then president resigns, apparently just because he's old and tired. And Saddam Hussein, now aged 42, is appointed Iraq's new president. And of course, what do you do when you've just taken over? You immediately move against your opponents, don't you? You basically take out everyone and you make clear what kind of rule you're going to have five days later, he summons 200 Ba'ath party members to an auditorium. And, you know,

it's a great scene, isn't it? Steve Cole, who has a relatively new book out called the Achilles trap that I think is fantastic and describes the relationship between the U.S. and the CIA and Saddam going back decades before the war describes this seed really well. It compares it to a Stalinist scene from the 1930s, where Saddam's sitting at a table on the stage, puffing on a cigar. There's TV cameras rolling. And of course, what do you do to purge people? You say that there's an awful plot that's already been discovered against Saddam and that some of the plotters, surprise, surprise, are in that very room. Wow. And so Saddam gets up, unfolds a piece of paper. Of course, you know, all pre-planned and choreographed, reads the names out loud of 60 people that he is

obviously loved and trusted. They're walked out of the room and Saddam, like so many psychopathic people, is also very emotional. And he dabbs his eyes with a handkerchief. 21 of them are executed by firing squad. That's the way he rolls. And he's building as well a cult of personality. Another great detail from that book.

By 1979, he's becoming a film producer. He bankrolls a film called Clash of Loyalties about Iraq's creation starring Oliver Rie. who in his time was a famous British actor, rather a drunken British actor, then Saddam commissions a six-hour TV adaptation of his own early life, which, you know, again, we'd all do if we have the time and the money, with a look-alike playing him. And then he pays Terence Young, who directed the first two Bond movies to edit this film.

And he's, of course, the glorious saviour of his nation, an eagle, as his mother calls him, and a champion of the Arab world. 1979. That is the year that Saddam comes to power. It is also the year of the Iranian Revolution, which brings Khomeini and the Islamic Republic into being. And Saddam sees himself as the champion of the Arab world,

and that is very much in contrast and in conflict with the Iranian Revolution and those Persians over there in Iran. Yeah, that's right. So on September the 22nd, 1980, Saddam launches air strikes on Iran and the next day launches a ground invasion into Kusistan, a strategic western province in Iran. He's going to claim he was provoked, you know, it wasn't him who struck first. Now, this was supposed to be a quick lightning strike against the Iranian regime, which had not bedded in, but which he thought would be a threat

to the region, Saddam seeing himself as a leader. He thought there'd be an uprising from some regions from minorities. Does that sound familiar? leading to a quick decisive victory against the Iranians. You can see where we're going there. The province he invades, Kuzistan has, I'm not sure at the time if it was majority Arab, but it has a significant Arab population. So I suppose Sadab drew a straight line from the beating heart of the pan-Arab world there in Baghdad, presuming that the Iranian Arabs would rise up.

Didn't work. These quick wars in Iran don't seem to go very well. And this one's an absolute disaster. isn't it for Saddam? Yeah. I mean, Iraq immediately gets bogged down in this war, and it becomes clear it's going to become a war of attrition. Iraq bombs Karg Island, which is the crucial oil terminal, which is in the news this year as well. And in retaliation, then Iran attacks shipping, carrying Iraqi oil in the strait of Hormuz, you know, again, sounding somewhat familiar. What you get

in that case, let's hope we don't get it this time, is a brutal eight-year war in which Iran uses these human wave attacks, quite young recruits, which shapes the Iranian regime. So I think if you want to understand Iran today, you have to look back at this war, don't you? Because it creates this cult of martyrdom and embeds the Revolutionary Guards in power and makes it think about how it preserves itself against being under attack. One, you know, we should say this will not be a series about Iran, but it is important to the story about this journey and this kind of conflict between the U.S. and Iraq, and it'll be really important to that story for a couple reasons in particular with respect to the Americans and WMD. So maybe there, let's take a break

and when we come back, we will see how Saddam navigates the end of this war. This episode is brought to you by Sky, from the writer of Bridge of Spies and the Baft winning director of Peaky Blinders, here comes the new Sky Original Action Thriller, Prisoner. Oh, with that, you know, this is going to be full of twists and turns. That's right, a prison transport officer and a professional killer, a handcuffed together and forced to go on the run, and they must make impossible moral choices in order to survive.

Now, in our world, we know that institutions are not always what they seem, don't we? That's right, David. and in this series, it's built around the things we find most compelling. Which are, of course, conspiracy, institutional corruption, and moral ambiguity. That's us. These are the grey areas where the right call isn't always clear. This is a fast-paced edge-of-your-seat story where you never quite know who to trust or what happens next. That's right, so it's the next great thing to binge, and you can watch all episodes from the 30th of April on Sky. Welcome back. We're in the Iran-Iraq War in the middle of the 1980s. And this is where Saddam Hussein's relationship with America, including the CIA, starts to get really complicated.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, suddenly having not been very keen on him, in the American eyes, Saddam is the lesser of two evils for Washington, because they really don't like the Iranians, as we know, hostage crisis, all these other things. So there's an element of my enemy's enemy as my friend. So as Iraq starts to struggle in this war against Iran, the CIA offers covert help to Saddam Hussein, primarily in the form of satellite imagery and intelligence about Iranian. positions. A former and also future US defense secretary. The once in future. The once and future the once and future king, Donald Rumsfeld, no less, goes as an envoy to Iraq in 1983 and 1984 to discuss this cooperation. The reality, though, is that I think the US doesn't really want Saddam or the Iranians to win. It wants a stalemating. It's quite useful if these two countries just pound each other. It's worth dwelling for a minute, I think, on how the U.S. perceived Saddam at this time, which is kind of hard to do because we have not yet had the first Gulf War, the Persian Gulf War, we have not yet had 2003.

We have not had the whole sanctions regime in the 90s, all of which we'll talk about. But if you just go back to this point, what is the American sense of Saddam? Is it just he's another brutal Arab dictator who could be our brutal Arab dictator? but we kind of don't like him, but he's unstable. And so we're just going to hope these two countries swing at each other for a while and bleed each other out. I mean, what's the sense of Saddam at the time? Yeah, he's definitely not a kind of client dictator like some of the other dictators in the region, where the U.S. has got defense deals and really actively supporting them.

Because he is one of the things about Saddam is he's very anti-Israel, and he is very fiercely kind of Arab nationalist. But he's useful. And I think that's why we're fundamentally talking about a largely covert relationship at this time, rather than a real overt friendship between the US and Iraq. But it's interesting because then in the mid-80s, the world learns that the US have been shock horror double dealing because there's been this thing called the Iran-Contra affair, which is where the CIA was also secretly helping Iran, or at least the White House. was and supplying it with US weapons, which is, I mean, it's a kind of wild story, isn't it? We haven't really got time to get into depths of it. We should definitely do it sometime because it's a crazy story. But it was giving the Iranians weapons in order to get hostages

freed and then channeling that money to Contras in Latin America to avoid the fact that Congress hadn't wanted them funded, something like that. It's all part of the Reagan trickle-down economy, Gordon. Eventually that money was going to trickle down to ordinary Americans. No, you got it right. And it says the insanity of how you just described it is why it would make a great series on the pod because it is absolutely wild. And Saddam, this is what I find this so interesting about the character of Saddam Hussein. Because Saddam is shocked by this, by these revelations.

He thinks, well, I thought the Americans were supporting me in the war. So for a ruthless double-dealing dictator who I think has been in the sort of muck and mire of the human experience, you would think he would see all of this as part of the game. But he doesn't. He's constantly misreading the U.S., constantly misreading the U.S. And has this view as well of the CIA being all-powerful, which I think a lot of people particularly at least. Which of course it is. Which of course it is. But of course it is.

Infallible or powerful. But he has this vision of it. So he's a little bit kind of confused by this. So that's one aspect of the Iran-Iraq War, which is very important for our story, which is this kind of strange relationship with the Americans. The second bit, though, is where we get to weapons of mass destruction. WMD, the shorthand, nuclear chemical and biological weapons. They're all a bit different.

But the Iran-Iraq War is also very important to understand these. So maybe we should start with the nuclear one. So in the 70s, Saddam, when he had been vice president, had been tasked with getting nuclear technology from France for peaceful purposes. Obviously, Gordon, right? This is clearly what they were after. We talked about this a bit in our short two-part series on Iran, which we released on April 13th, looking at this question of what you could do to degrade around nuclear capabilities. And so it's really the Iraqi desire ambition for a nuclear program predates Saddam's regime and presidency. Yeah. Saddam is, as I said, virulently anti-Israel. He wants to be a leader in the Arab world confronting Israel.

Israel, they all know have the bomb. So that's another one of the drivers. We talked a little bit, didn't we, about how then Israel obviously does not want Iraq to get the bomb. have these Mossad, plots, bombings, assassinations, and actually an attack on Iraq itself in 1981. Yeah, the reactor arrives and is on the path to becoming operational. But in the summer of 1981, Israel targets that reactor before it's loaded with fuel. There's an airstrike. Again, we talked about this briefly in our nuclear series on Iran. It's less than two minutes, Israel has blown a hole in the reactor's dome and destroyed the control room inside, which causes in Upper Florida collapse into the reactor's core, and that piece of technology, that

critical piece of Saddam's nuclear ambitions are destroyed in just a couple minutes of Israeli air power. But it's not the air. Oh, but it's not. It's not the end? Oh, man. Shockingly, shockly. We talked about this a little bit in that series, but this is where, you know, we asked question of, well, is that this Israeli strike successful. It was successful in destroying the reactor, but then it changes Saddam's calculations about the path to get to a nuclear bomb. Yeah, rather than thinking, I'm not going to go for it, he wants to double down. He really wants one now, and he believes he needs one as a deterrent and as a means of projecting force. So after the strikes, Saddam summons a top nuclear scientist, a man called Jaffa Dia Jaffa.

I met him actually after the Iraq War of 2003. I met him in 2004. in Paris. And I think the first interview he did after the fall of Saddam. Really interesting character. He is effectively the godfather, to some extent, of the Iraqi nuclear program, as it was. Very erudite, very smart, very proud of his work. And like all of the best people of trained in Britain, which is, he definitely had a mixed view of Britain. But he spent 10 years at boarding school. in Britain, and then been at university in Britain, learning to be a nuclear physicist. And then Saddam had asked him back first in the 70s to work on the nuclear program. He'd actually been jailed briefly. It's a really interesting story because he pleaded for the release of another nuclear scientist who was a

friend who'd been imprisoned for not being willing to help Saddam. But after the Israeli strike, after 1981, Jaffa is summoned by Saddam. And Saddam tells him, and he recounted this to me, Saddam says, I want a bomb. I think I need one as a deterrent against future attacks. And I want you to build me one. I'd imagine Gordon, you're very proud to have matriculated the father of Iraq's nuclear bomb. Where did he go to school, by the way, when he was in the UK? Well, he went to Seaford College, a boys boarding school in Sussex. And then he goes to the University of Birmingham and studies nuclear physics there. He is actually a very impressive scientist. And that's one of the interesting things about him is I think he was underestimated because

I think a lot of people were, how does this guy know about nuclear physics? He knew what he was doing. So he goes back to Iraq in the 70s because Saddam can see his value. At one point, interestingly enough, he's jailed just briefly for pleading for the release of another nuclear scientist who'd been jailed by Saddam. so he's standing up for fellow scientists as well, but he's summoned by Saddam after that strike in 1981 by Israel. And Saddam tells him directly, and I remember him talking to me about this,

that Saddam says, I want you to build me the bomb. And of course, they're going to have to change routes. They can't do it with a big reactor anymore. It's too obvious. So instead he's going to go down the clandestine uranium, enrichment route. It's the Iranian route, right, in some ways? To some extent, yeah. The Iranians also go down the enrichment route. They are using centrifuges, but Jafar thinks, well, these are quite hard to build, and he's right, they're hard to build, and hard to get the parts without being spotted.

So instead, he actually goes down another enrichment route involving something called electromagnetic isotope separation, David, which I'm sure. Are you going to do the science explainer on it now? You should. I think this is your chance. I should. You should. You use electromagnets to separate the isotopes. Yeah. That's what you do. But it is one of the techniques used in the Manhattan Project in American World War II. And you do use large magnets, I think. That's all I know. Really, really big magnets are an important part of it. Which again sounds a bit of Austin Powers. But it's quite hard to produce it. But Saddam is obviously pressuring him around 1987. Saddam is saying, you know, press forward for a bomb. Jafar says,

maybe I can get one by 1990. And Saddam tells him, if you produce the nuclear bomb, I will make a golden statue of you. Which is a very kind of Saddam kind of offer. That's what you want, a golden statue. What does Jafar think about producing a bomb for Saddam Hussein? Does he have some moral qualms about this work, or is he cool with it? I asked him about this directly. And I said, you know, Saddam's a dictator.

He's not a pleasant man. And did you have any crimes about trying to build him a bomb? And there was his long pause. And he says, well, we didn't quite get to that stage, but you're on the way, I said. And he said, you know, I didn't think about it very much. I was just kind of engaged in the technical side. I think fundamentally he viewed it as creating a deterrent to prevent Iraq being attacked and that being his duty. So the one thing he does do, though, quite successfully.

And again, this is really important for our story, is he's good at keeping it secret. So the CIA do not know about this clandestine program that Jafar is building. And they are judging that Iraq couldn't build a bomb without foreign help or equipment or a nuclear reactor. And I think, you know, it's interesting because I think they're quite dismissive of scientists like Jafar. I think the view is these Arabs, you know, they can't build their own bomb. It requires Western help, Western technology, Western assistance, or something else. And I think they underestimate him and others. Well, and I suppose at the time, that's a logical assumption.

It's an assumption. But the Israeli program was created in part from stealing plans of technology from other programs. In the 70s, the Iraqi program, that reactor was a French reactor. And so much of the technical expertise and scientific expertise that the Iraqis had in the 70s was from France. So it's a reasonable assumption, but this will be a problem much later because it's an assumption that is untested and is proven to be dramatically wrong in time. And it's not just, when we talk about WMD, it's not just nuclear, is it? It's chemical weapons as well. Yeah. And these are an important part of our story, because after the 1981 strike on

the nuclear reactor. Saddam also orders more work on chemical weapons, calls it Project 92. The aim is to develop things like mustard gas and deadly agents like Sarin and VX, which you can place on artillery shells. This stuff is really nasty too. I had a little bit of experience with this when we were dealing with the Syrian chemical weapons issue in 2012 and 2013. And this stuff is just awful. And I think it's important. to at least mention what it does to a human when it's, when a human inhales this or is exposed to it, because it's a large part of why there's so much horror about someone like Saddam

or regime like Saddam's having these kind of weapons, because what these chemical weapons, they more or less do, is they kill your body's ability to turn off its own nervous system. And it leads to things like tightening of the chest, you can't breathe, you go into seizures, you lose muscle control over your entire body. It's agonizing when you're exposed to this and when someone's dying. So it is a really horrifying set of weapons that Saddam is trying to build. Yeah.

And with help from German companies, Iraq builds in the early 80s, what's officially the state enterprise for pesticide production at Almatana. But in reality, that's his chemical weapons facility. And what's important is he's not. just going to develop it, he's going to use things like mustard gas in the Iran-Iraq war at that time. It's being used because as we said, it's a war of attrition. You've got the Iranians throwing human waves at them. And that's where the Iraqis think, well, what's useful is chemical weapons. Now, again, this gets to some controversial areas because what did the US know about this?

Because if you go back, you know, you'll remember the US is supplying satellite imagery of Iranian positions, which the Iraqis are then hitting with chemical weapons. Now, that is different from saying the US was directly, you know, encouraging or supporting the use of chemical weapons. And I don't think they would have done. But they certainly knew they were being used because reports start to kind of emerge. And that satellite imagery continues during that period. I think maybe the most dramatic and awful use of chemical weapons came in a place called Halabja,

which I think you've visited, Gordon. Yeah, I was in Iraq in this Kurdish region. So it's in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. And I visited it just before the war in 2003. So I was there in February 2003. And I went to Halabja. And this was a place that Saddam targeted because the Kurds were allies. or seen as sympathetic to the Iranians.

And there was something called the Anfal campaign linked by one of Saddam's cousins who becomes known as Chemical Alley, which is because he was gassing the Kurds. So I'm there about 15 years afterwards. So obviously there's nothing physically left, but I remember interviewing one guy who showed me a bunker in which he'd hid when the chemicals had been dropped from the sky.

over the town. And he told me about how he just emerged eventually from this bunker and found that most of his relatives had died from the gas attacks. And I think something like 5,000 are killed in Halabja, in one town alone. It is a reminder that Saddam is a terrible tyrant and actually did have chemical weapons and did use them against, well, his own people.

But at the time, the US downplays the reports. Doesn't say that's not true, but people don't care about him. But for many people, this is one of the reasons why they will want to get rid of Saddam is because they will view him as a murderous tyrant, you know, for those people who care about human rights and the Kurds. And there were definitely constituencies who felt that, who remember Halabja and say, this is kind of dark evil man. And in particular, a lot of Iraqi exiles who will repeat that mantra, which is true over and over again to people in Washington and in London in an attempt to sell the war.

But by the summer of 1988, the Iran-Iraq War has come to an end. It's fair to say nobody won this one. It ends essentially in a draw. it has cost the Iraqis a lot of money and lives. And Saddam, who wants to be a winner, and to probably, thinking back to his past and his sort of ruthless upbringing, understands that not winning a war might be interpreted as a sign of weakness, both by the Iranians and by people inside his own regime. So he needs money. He needs to replace what he has lost of the war. and what does he do next, Gordon?

Yeah, Saddam is also becoming a bit more angry and paranoid and a bit unbalanced at this time. I think that's the general view. He's building bigger monuments to himself. He also has these two sons and we'll come back to them, Uday and Kusay, who are barbaric and corrupt. And he's also lashing out against the West. He wants to be the champion of the Arab world. He actually hangs a British journalist from the Observer newspaper who'd collected soil samples. in the country to try and prove the use of chemical weapons, claims he's a spy.

Saddam is preoccupied with assassination plots, particularly with Israel. But as part of his move against the Arab world, the next move does surprise everyone. He's angry that the Arab states had loaned him money, but now want the money back. Kuwait, in particular, he's angry at because it won't wipe out the debts that he owes them from the war. There's also a long-standing border dispute. Iraq and Kuwait and Kuwaiti have a border together. He claims that the Kuwaitis are slanting their oil drilling under the border to steal Iraq's oil. But he does something which I think no one really thought he would do in the summer of 1990, which he decides he's going to invade Kuwait and seize it. In one sense, it's out of the blue and in another, there was a buildup observed because the CIA, is watching satellite imagery, presumably of the troop buildup on Iraq's border with Kuwait. Another important theme of this series will be, we're not in the mind of Saddam Hussein and have a

hard time understanding the kinds of things Saddam Hussein does and why he does them. We mirror image onto Saddam when he has his own logic and interior kind of rationality, but it's thought to be a bit of a coin flip, whether he's not going to invade. Yeah, the question is, is he just building up forces on the border to pressure? Kuwait or is he going to do it? It's a bit like, you know, the debates around is Russia going to invade Ukraine in 2022 is surely Putin won't be mad enough. Well, in this case, you know, Saddam is. There's a little interesting failure of U.S. to terrorists because Saddam seems to think the U.S. is not going to object. And he has a meeting with a U.S. diplomat in Baghdad. And he monologues

at this U.S. diplomat, April Glasby, for about an hour, which Saddam does. And she, in response, gives him the official lie, which is, we have no opinion on the U. Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait. Now, she thinks, well, this is actually, I am just giving him the official line. But he's like, oh, well, you know. Why didn't you tell me not to invade, right? Exactly. It's one of the many times where Saddam misunderstands Washington.

And I think his failure to understand America is one of the themes of our stories. He thinks, again, the CIA is all powerful. They'll know he's planning to invade. So if they don't want him to evade, then they'll tell him not to do it. it. And instead, they just kind of come out with some, you know, lines. So he thinks he can get away with it. August the 2nd, 1990. Iraqi troops go into Kuwait, says it's going to be annexed to be Iraq's 19th province. Exciting news for the Kuwaiti royal family. Yeah. Thrilling. In Baghdad, it's interesting. The number two in the U.S.

Embassy at the time is a diplomat called Joe Wilson. And he's going to play a role later in our story. And he kind of records being woken up in the middle of night, said, you know, I have the White House on the line. And he's kind of half asleep. And he thinks it's the president. And he says, I stood at attention stark naked and saluted. And then the line went dead. And then he calls back. And it's actually just the National Security Council telling him, don't you know there's been an invasion? We know what's happening. And he goes to see Saddam, who says, we'll keep Kuwait. And if you don't react, we'll give you all the oil. We'll be your regional enforcer. We promise not to attack Saudi Arabia. But if you fight us, we'll spill the blood of 10,000 soldiers in the

sands of Arabia, and we don't believe you'll do that. That's Saddam's kind of view. Seems reasonable. But of course, the US does decide to drive them out of Kuwait. It is in part about oil. It's also about an expression of this New World Order post the collapse of the Soviet UDN. The U.S. wants to show that it is going to enforce these kind of rules that you can't redefined boundaries by force. And it's also a win for the Brits, isn't it? Gordon. Yeah, because famously Margaret Thatcher, who's just at this point about to finish her time as prime minister,

calls up US President George H.W. Bush, the first Bush president, and says, this is no time to go wobbly, George, which is to try and stiffen the US spine, which I love. But what it means is also they go through the UN as well. Are you claiming that he might have, that George H.W. Bush might have backed down had the Iron Lady not stiffened his spine, Gordon? I don't know. Well, I think I just like that because it's very Thatcherite. But they also go through the UN, and that's important part of the story. So the UN is involved. You know, they get UN authorization to do this. And then the US assembles this massive military force or something. Half a million troops, don't they? in Saudi Arabia.

That will, of course, become a major sticking point for Samab bin Laden at that stage and will become a large part of his complaints against the United States and the royal family in Saudi. This is interesting, though, that Saddam had chemical weapons ready to use during the Gulf War, but he doesn't use them. And the U.S. of course, know he's got the chemical weapons because I know what's happened in the Halamptu in places. So the U.S. sends a message, and there's a meeting between the U.S. Secretary of

state James Baker and his Iraqi counterpart. And the US says, you know, do not use chemical weapons on our troops. And the US even suggests it would consider going nuclear against Iraq in response. And Saddam remembers this as Iraq being told, we will send you back to the pre-industrial age if you use chemical weapons. I mean, who does that sound like? It's kind of interesting, isn't that in the world of, it sounds Trumpian. It does. Wasn't the, there was a threat leveled against, was it the Pakistanians that if they didn't help after 9-11, do I have this right, that they would be bombed back into the Stone Age? That was another, another threat leveled against them. So, I mean, we're, we, we have some consistency here in the. Yeah, but it's interesting, is that? The finer arts

of diplomacy, Gordon. This is all this tactful diplomacy. Yeah. The Iraq. The Iraqi officials call what's coming the mother of all battles, but of course it's totally one-sided because the US starts its aerial assault January 17th, 1991, first use of these kind of guided cruise missiles as well, isn't it? The other thing, though, again, this is so interesting when it comes to the echoes of today is that as they're building up for the ground invasion, the US make clear they want regime change, but they want the Iraqi people to do it rather than for the US forces to do it inside the country. Yeah, some pretty strong echoes of the beginnings of Operation Epic Fury. Trump essentially told the Iranian people that this was their time to rise up. They won't have a better opportunity, very similar to the messaging around the Gulf War. So on February 15th, President Bush, again, H.W. Bush, says that there is a way of avoiding a war. And that was for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands.

force Saddam to step aside. The CIA translates Bush's remarks to Arabic, broadcast them into Iraq, and the ground war begins. It lasts only 100 hours from February 24th. It is amazing. It's quick, and it also is, it's not just the U.S. There's a massive allied force of 41 nations that goes in, and the Iraqi army is absolutely overpowered and mode down and retreats back into.

Iraq. Yeah, and I remember this at the time that the US was almost squeamish about the level of destruction it was inflicting on retreating Iraqi forces. I mean, they were just mowing them down as they retreated. And it's almost too easy. And at this point, the US has clearly won, but it doesn't want to go all the way to Baghdad because the mandate they've got from the United Nations is to reject Iraq from Kuwait. And so they decide, okay, that's what we're going to do. At that point, we're going to stop. And there's not actually that much dissent at the time, but the decision is we're not going to go all the way up to Baghdad and do regime change ourselves. It's fascinating to me that Dick Cheney, for example, who was the Defense Secretary at the time, didn't seem to

have any major issue with this. You think of Dick Cheney as being constantly hawkish and yet, you know, he seems to have gone along with this. Everybody in Washington thinks that Saddam is very unlikely to survive a defeat. So it's just a matter of time before someone inside the regime or some internal coalition of Kurds and oppositionists takes him out. And they're nearly right, because the regime collapses in 14 out of Iraq's 18 provinces. Saddam's afraid, the Shia population, which is the majority of Iraq, largely in the south of Iraq, they start to rise up, throwing pictures of Saddam, there's an uprising. The U.S. have incited a revolt. This is what President Bush called for, but at that point, it doesn't come to help. The parallels again with Iran

in 26 are pretty wild, aren't they? President Trump telling the Iranian people to rise up and then help will be on the way and it really wasn't. So that is definitely a a recurring theme. But there's a ceasefire deal that has agreed to by the U.S. and the Iraqis on March 3rd of 1991. Saddam is allowed, this I found to be wild, he is still allowed to fly his helicopters. It gets back, I think, to your point about the U.S. almost being squeamish about the level of destruction that they had inflicted, because Saddam survives the war with some really critical pieces of military hardware still in his possession, which he'll then use to crush this uprising. It seems like a terrible mistake in retrospect. I think in hindsight, people do think it was a

real mistake. And officials at the time do not realize how significant it is, that they let him keep his helicopters. And then he's got some divisions of his, what he calls his Special Republican Guard, the kind of elite military. And he uses the helicopters to basically guide his remaining troops to go and crush the uprising that the US had called for. And they've allowed him to keep the means to crush that uprising. So almost, I mean, it isn't a deliberate move by the US. It's a mistake. But by mistake, they allow Saddam to survive in power. In the north, it's slightly different because you get refugees flooding over the border. They're the US and UK decide they're going to impose a no-fly zone in the north of Iraq, which is primarily

Kurdish and shoot down any Iraqi planes which enter that airspace, which in turn will allow the Kurds in the north to establish an autonomous safe haven outside of Iraqi control. So for the next, until 2003, that area will be effectively autonomous from Saddam Hussein and under Kurdish control. But Saddam remains in power in Baghdad. And that really sets the scene for a simmering confrontation between the US. in Iraq over the next decade. And the U.S. have effectively missed the chance at that point to do regime change, but they're going to come back to it again and again and look for other ways

of doing it. So having missed this really probably the best possible chance for regime change, President H.W. Bush, in May of 91, so just a few months after the war ends, signs a covert action finding authorizing the CIA to create the conditions that would lead to Saddam's removal from power. So it essentially becomes policy of the Bush administration to remove Saddam from power. Regime change in Iraq becomes U.S. policy in May of 1991. But the real question is, what has happened to the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam had during prior to the war? That answer is really surprising. And it's going to determine why everyone gets things wrong in 2003.

So let's stop there and next time we'll look at the aftermath of the war, the 1990s inspections, the run up to 2003. But a reminder, of course, you do not have to wait because if you're a member of the Declassified Club, then you can hear all six episodes of this series straight away. And David, they get access to the bonus episodes with Alistair Campbell, Richard Dearlob and Mike morale or by joining at the rest is classified.com. Also, our binder that we have a live show in London on the 4th and 5th of September. You can get your tickets for that at the rest is classified.com.

We will see you next time. See you next time.