The Rest Is Classified - 154. The Road to Iraq: Saddam Hussein's Fatal Error (Ep 2)

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

Why did Saddam Hussein secretly destroy his weapons of mass destruction? When did the CIA start plotting against the Iraqi dictator? And did Hussein and Osama bin Laden ever meet? In the second part of their series on Iraq WMD, David and Gordon chart how the mystery of Saddam Hussein’s weapons deepens. ------------------- 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: Joe Pettit 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. What has happened to Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction? As inspectors hunt for them on the ground, the CIA plots regime change, and the confrontation builds. Well, welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera. And we are in the wake of the First Gulf War, the 1991 War, that ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.

And Saddam Hussein has made a very fateful decision. I would also argue a very surprising decision that is going to set in motion an incredible misunderstanding between Saddam Hussein and the United States of America. and it is a decision that no one really knows about or understands at the time. This episode is brought to you by HP. In intelligence work, it's rarely the obvious problem that causes failure. It's the overlooked detail or the flaw nobody quite solved. The kind of vulnerability, intelligence services look for. And running a business is the same, especially when you're building or growing a team.

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The rest is classified listeners also benefit from 10% off HP business technology with code TRIC10. So on the 3rd of April 1991, the UN Security Council adopts Resolution 687, which says Iraq will remain under strict economic sanctions until it acknowledges and disqualifies and dismalcies. destroys all of its nuclear chemical and biological, its WMD programs. And so the idea will be for UN inspectors to go in and confirm they'd be destroyed. They'll be part of a new body called the UN Special Commission or unscum. But, and this is Saddam's strange, odd, fateful decision. In June and July, before they arrive, before the inspectors come in, Saddam issues orders to secretly destroy the WMD facilities before the UN could confirm their true purpose.

All communicated through Hussein Carmel, an important character. He's Saddam's cousin. He's married to one of Saddam's daughters, a lot of intermarriage here, and he's vying to be Saddam's successor. And so the orders come through and in July a team led by an Iraqi scientist destroy about 1,000 chemical bombs, 20 chemical warheads built for missiles, other teams destroy VX precursor chemicals, mustard gas precursors, some VX agent. It's a really odd, interesting, strange, important move. And it's quite hard to understand, isn't it?

To state it plainly, Saddam has decided to do exactly what the US and the UN want him to do. but he has decided to do it secretly and thus get no credit with the US or the UN for what he has done. Yeah, I mean, that sums it up. So the question is why. I mean, I do think the crucial thing is he wants to get the sanctions lifted that have been imposed by the UN. And he wants to get them lifted as fast as possible. So he may well have feared that if he'd admitted to everything that he'd done, and he knew he'd done more than the West knew, then the West would be shocked and the sanctions

might not be lifted. Whereas if he just destroyed everything, secretly, they wouldn't find anything and the sanctions would be lifted. There's a missing piece of the logic there, though, isn't there? Yeah. There's a step, a really important step, which is that the US also doesn't think that I'm hiding it. Yeah, it's a problem.

And I mean, it is, it's just hard to grasp. But Saddam clearly, you know, Jaffar, dear Jaffa, his nuclear scientist, who I spoke to, said to me, you know, Saddam decided to terminate the programs that July, hoping the sanctions would be lifted. That's the priority. Get the sanctions lifted. And then potentially you could rebuild the programs. So he's just taken this odd move. And I think also, you know, back to our psychology, our pop psychology of Saddam, I think, you know, He doesn't want to look weak and like he's giving something up and being forced to give up material.

Far better to kind of make out you never had anything in the first place rather than kind of be seen to hand over a load of WMD. Because I think he still views having weapons of mass destruction as important as a deterrent as the kind of survival of his regime, doesn't he? He does. We should say, I mean, in 1991, he is just a few years removed from an absolutely devastating war with Iran in which he used mustard gas, use chemical munitions against the Iranians. And so he probably sees the possession of those weapons or the Iranian belief that he possesses those weapons as an important deterred against the Iranians, probably also sees those weapons and the delivery mechanisms, the missiles, as being a deterrent against the Israelis. So he doesn't want to tell the region that he doesn't have this stuff.

And I suppose underlying a lot of Saddam's thinking about the Americans and the CIA in particular is the belief that the CIA has penetrated his regime and knows what is going on. And so I guess if you have that as an underlying assumption about the U.S., then his plan makes some sense because he doesn't have to publicly come out and tell all of his regional rivals that he's neutered himself. And the Americans, he also doesn't need to overtly tell us because we'll already have collected the information to indicate that he's destroyed it in secret. So in his mind, this plan makes a lot of sense. With those assumptions in place, this plan makes some sense. The crucial mistake, and this is the crucial mistake of Saddam, is to destroy the weapons secretly and unilaterally without any UN supervision, without actually even any documentation

of what he was doing. What it means is there's no way of proving you've done this in the future. It's done without record keeping, without photography. It's a mistake which actually in the end will doom him. Because when he says to people, I haven't got any weapons, he can't prove he's not lying. He can't prove that he's got rid of them. And that is going to be the crucial problem for Saddam because of this slightly weird decision in the wake of the First Gulf War. There's also another big problem, which is the nuclear program, because we've been talking about the chem and the bio, the CW and the BW programs.

But Hussein Kamal, who remember his Saddam's son-in-law, had tried to race for a kind of quick, simple, single bomb after the invasion of Kuwait to deter the Americans hadn't gotten close. But Hussein Kamal tells Jafar, the top nuclear scientist, the guy who you interviewed in Paris, not to voluntarily confess to anything. Yeah. And so you have, the Iraqis can't prove that they've destroyed their, their Cesar. and BW and BW stocks, which they have, and nor are they willing to admit how far away from a nuclear bomb they are. Yeah. And then the inspectors arrive in 1991, and they're thinking from the UN, thinking,

oh, this might take more than a year to sort everything out, two teams of inspectors. So you've got Unscon, which is under Rolf Achaas, and then the nuclear agency, the IAEA, under Hans Blix, who was there in the 90s, and he will return in the old. in the early 2000, the important figure when it comes to nuclear weapons program. And of course, immortalized what else, but Team America. Anyone who's not seen Team America World Police should shame on you for not having seen it. But it is. That's right.

I mean, it is one of the great films about American foreign policy. And it is also puppets, isn't it? It is puppets. It features a very graphic scene of puppet sex, I should say. So if you're a listener to this podcast and are thinking of some family, entertainment. I would not direct you toward Team America World Police. But Hans Blix, who probably the real Hans Blix probably never thought as an IAEA bureaucrat that he would be featured in a major motion picture as a puppet. But he, of course, he is. And he visits Kim Jong-il's palace

in order to inspect it for nuclear weapons. And it doesn't go well for odds. It doesn't go well for Hans Blix, but it's that great bit where he, which is kind of relevant, which is where he goes and he says, let me into your palace and show me your weapons. And the North Korean leader goes, or what, or what? And Hans Blitz goes, or we'll write you a very angry letter. We will be angry with you and we will write you a letter telling you how angry we are with you. That is the perception of the, of the U.N. at the time. But then Kim Jong-il has him sucked into his shark tank where the puppet Hans Blix is consumed by nurse sharks. And torn apart by them. And torn apart by nurse sharks. We should say that the real Hans Blix actually jokes about his being featured in the film and finds it quite amusing.

But anyway, back to Iraq. Back to Iraq. The inspectors arrived and Hans Blix's nuclear inspectors are actually shocked by what they find. Because as we discussed, us last time, Iraq had engaged on this clandestine enrichment program and they've got much further than anyone thought. You know, they've made progress on electromagnetic isotope separation and even on centrifuges, thanks to some engineers, even some work on weaponization. And, you know, they're not close to a bomb. It's still taking them years to get to a bomb.

But it's a total shock, a total shock to the CIA and Western intelligence because they'd miss this program and its progress. And so the question is, if you've missed that, what else have you missed? They had missed the nuclear program. There was knowledge of the CW and BW programs, but not the nuclear program. And I guess the lesson for the CIA and for analysts in the UK would be that despite all of their advanced technology that had destroyed Saddam's military in no time in Kuwait and all of the intelligence they had, they had failed to spot the secret nuclear program and had dramatically underestimated what the Iraqis would be able to do on their own in secret.

And so there is a almost a collective resolution in Western intelligence not to repeat that mistake again. Yeah, that's right. And what they don't know, but Jafar inside the nuclear program does, is that yes, they may progress, but now Saddam has given orders to destroy it all effectively and to destroy all the equipment. Jafar has actually moved to work on, you know, civilian electricity programs in the 90s. But of course, the US and the UK think, oh, no, there's going to be another secret nuclear program going on. So the inspectors start building this picture up as the 90s progress

of what Iraq had really been up to. And of course, you get this tension with the Iraqis who thought they were just going to get a clean bill of health. After all, they've destroyed everything, and then the sanctions are going to be lifted. And instead, the inspectors keep binding these little fragments of information about things, and not much yet on the biological weapons program. But that, and this is important, is then going to be revealed as well to have made more progress than they thought. Because August 1995, you get a really bizarre moment for the regime, which shatters, I think, some of the,

the unity around Saddam's regime because Hussein Carmel, who's this important figure, Saddam's son-in-law, his cousin, potentially his successor, suddenly pitches up in Amar and Jordan in a fleet of black Mercedes, with him his wife, who is Saddam's daughter, another of Saddam's daughters and her husband,

and they say they've come to defect from Saddam's regime. I mean, it's crazy, isn't it? It's a moment which suggests the regime is fracturing because there's been this internal, feud with Saddam's sons, Uday and Kusay. And Uday is like totally crazy, shooting people at parties. He shoots up Hussein Carmel's house after one argument. And Hussein Carmel fears, I think, that Saddam's sons are beating him in the race for succession.

Uday was the son who I think famously ran or oversaw the Iraqi Olympic Committee and the Iraqi Football Association and oversaw. personally, the torture of underperforming players and athletes. I mean, the regime is a very twisted thing by this point. Yeah. You could see why he would want to get out of there. So Hussein Carmel flees, because he thinks he's losing out, flees to Jordan. Western intelligence pumps him for information. He's Saddam's son-in-law, and he's overseen the WMD programs.

This is a terrific defector to have, you know, seated in front of you if you're a CIA officer. And St. Kamal reveals that there's even more that Western intelligence didn't know in particular about advances in the biological weapons program. Yeah, that's right. So he reveals the secrets of this BW biological weapons program. And in turn, Saddam, of course, knows that Hussein Carmel has these secrets and he's going to share them. And so Saddam, in turn, is worried by this.

and decides he better come clean about aspects of this program to preempt him and to not look like he's been hiding stuff so much. So the Iraqis send to the inspectors a female scientist called Rehab Taha, who I'm afraid another Iraqi WMD scientist trained in Britain, proud to say, British trained, the University of East Anglia in her case. And she, I mean, she inevitably becomes known as Dr. Germ by the British... That's not very clever. No. It's kind of on the nose, isn't it?

It's on the nose. It's interesting because it does make it sound like this kind of bond villainous, trained in Britain to develop biological weapons. I mean, I spoke to inspectors who met her, who sat down with her and said she was not some evil character. She was basically a scientist under huge pressure by the regime to do stuff for them, you know, because your life depended on it and your family's life depended on it. But she meets the inspectors at this point.

And again, it's stunning because she and others are going to reveal that Iraq had built facilities to produce botulinum toxin, which is a deadly agent, ad anthrax, another deadly agent, that Iraq had loaded these agents onto bombs and missile warheads on the eve of the 1991 war. There'd even been a secret mobile fermentation project to develop weapons. And again, the inspectors in the West are astonished by this. And Rolf Okaeus of Unscom complains, well, where are the documents? So a few days later, they take the inspectors to a chicken farm. And hidden in the chicken farm are 170 boxes of documents about this secret program, which, again, they say, they say, Hussein Carmel had ordered all of these weapons destroyed way back. but without keeping the records of the destruction from years back.

If you're going to destroy a CW or BW program and you hope to get credit with the inspectors, you probably want to retain some records of the destruction. That is our bit of advice for anyone currently running a CW or BW program. That's our little tip. Keep the receipts. That's all we're saying. Keep the receipts. And then Hussein Kamal decides to take the very logical step of going.

back to Iraq. Redefecting, which always turns out really well for redefectors. Yeah. I mean, it is bizarre, isn't it? I mean, he, I think he's not very smart, Hussein Kamala. I mean, he's obviously not because he's going back to Iraq. I think he realizes no one is backing him to be the next leader of Iraq and everyone's not rallying around him.

Not even the Syrians want to give him shelter. Is that a swipe? Sorry. Syrian, Gordon, who are just willing to accept anyone? I think he thought they'd help. him. But this Jordanian official, I met a Jordanian official and asked him about this period. And this Jordanian official said to me, I told him not to go and I told him he'd be executed in seven days on returning to Iraq. I was wrong. He was executed in two days. So, I mean, he lasts two days.

And first, Saddam's daughter has to divorce him. So it's like divorce death. I mean, utterly predictable with Saddam, isn't it? But there you go. And there's some murkiness about how the brothers are killed and the circumstances of these executions, aren't there? Yeah, it's how far they were, was it Saddam's orders, where they kind of shot up? Was it the sons who did it? I think there's a, yeah, there's a little bit of murkiness. Well, in any case, I guess what this admittedly very bizarre incident does confirm is that Saddam Hussein had WMB programs prior to the 91 war. He had lied about them. Those programs were. maybe further along in some cases than Western intelligence had thought.

They've been covered up. And now, even if he's being forced to own up to them, it doesn't cover up the fact that he had been tried to hide them for many, many years. And so Western intelligence has been totally deceived. It's actually, I mean, it's a pretty significant intelligence failure on the part of most Western intelligence services to have missed this. It also, I guess, confirms the idea that. the Iraqis are really good at deceiving Western intelligence services about these WMD programs

and the capabilities that they have. So there are a lot of different assumptions, strategic assumptions that start to filter into the binds of Western analysts about Iraqi WMD programs as a result of the way Saddam handles this. Yeah, but he's cunning, he's deceitful. Saddam is a master of deception. He's always hiding his programs. Every time even when you revealed something like the chicken farm documents, it just makes them more convinced that there's more to be found. So I think with that, you have this sense of mistrust of Saddam. And equally, Saddam's mistrust of the Americans is going to grow because he's going to realize the CIA is plotting to remove him. Oh, that's good cliffhanger.

Let's take a break. and when we come back, we'll see what those clever people of the CIA have gotten up to. This episode is brought to you by Sky, from the writer of Bridge of Spies and the BAFTA 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. 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 gray 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 now on Sky.

Well, welcome back. The tensions between Iraq and particularly the US are growing as the 90s continue. April 1993, an interesting little side note, which is going to be an important part of our story when we get to the war years later, Kuwait's security services, announced the arrest of 17 people, they say, for plotting to assassinate the former president, George H.W. Bush, now just left office during a visit to Kuwait earlier that month, April

1993 with a carbom. Now, this was allegedly organized by Iraqi intelligence, they say, the Kuwaitis, not totally clear if it's for real or how serious it was. I mean, Steve Colin in his book, The Achilles Trap, says someone, Wanda, if it might have been a Kuwaiti setup, but it adds to this sense that there's a feud, a grudge between the two sides. And President Clinton now in office fires some missiles at Iraqi Intelligence HQ to make a point in response. He orders it at night, though, when no one's there, a little bit performative.

One of the missiles goes astray and kills a famous Iraqi painter. So the tension's growing, isn't it? It is. And underneath all of this, of course, it has become really official U.S. government policy to clandestinely remove Saddam from power because there's a finding that had been signed by the George H.W. Bush administration right after the Persian Gulf War to authorize the CIA to create, you know, the conditions for the removal of Saddam. Now, Bill Clinton is in office after George H.W. Bush,

and Clinton likes the idea of a coup. He likes the idea of, you. He likes the idea of, using the CIA, using covert action to try to get rid of Saddam. Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it? Because it's something we see again and again, and we talked about this right from the 50s, which is presidents like the idea of getting rid of their opponents. They don't really want to go through the risks, the efforts of war to do it. So if someone says, well, we might be able to do it with the CIA covertly, then they're going to go, oh, yeah, go, you know, go have a look at that.

And so you get that desire to do it. But I have to say it's part of the urge to do something and the temptation to think you can do it easily with over action. I don't think it's a very serious commitment, though, at this point. It's more of a kind of minor temptation. No, although I will say foreshadowing the intelligence failure that is to come in 2003, I think one of the crucial implications of so much of the operations, work done by CIA in the 1990s being focused on the covert action program in Iraq, is that there isn't a tremendous focus on actually penetrating Saddam's regime

or getting sources close to Saddam to collect on his plans and intentions. Or on what WMD, yeah. Or on what WMD he has or doesn't have. So I think that there is a kind of unintended consequence of leaning on this covert action program to create a kind of a collection bias toward stuff that feeds that program and not toward you know, sort of the typically bread and butter, you know, collection on plans and intentions and big, you know, military programs and capabilities. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting point.

So the CIA put in a high-flying CIA officer called Bob Baer. I don't know if you ever met him. I have. He's a really interesting guy. He's going to be made number two in the Iraq Operations Group to see if he can push forward these covert plans. And Bob was quite an experienced Middle East Central Asia officer. Reputation as a risk taker. I think that's one of the things about him. He was the kind of guy who liked to be out in the field. Also wrote the book that became or that was adapted as

Siriana, the film starring, I think Matt Damon and George Clooney. And Bear had some colorful language to start to describe the Iraq operations group in those years. He said someone warned him that he would need to be kind of a risk taker because, quote, you're going to have your hands full. I.O.G, the Iraq operations group is swarming with drunkards and whores. That is not, it sounds like a pirate ship, maybe, not so much. A CIA team. A CIA component. But as Bear recalls one officer, but caught having sex in the infirmary. What do they mean by infirmary here. Is there not a CIA infirmary? Is they not? I don't know. I guess the Office of Medical Service. I think of a field hospital when I hear infirmary. Another person who had apparently

gotten quite drunk and passed out behind the steering wheel of their car in the Langley parking lot, which, you know, I mean, who hasn't been there, Gordon? Let's, let's, CIA in the 90s. The CIA in the 90s. This is before your time, we should say, David. That's true. I was not there. It was a completely different ship later. But that is the kind of picture Bob paints of the Iraq operations group. And the kryptonym, we love a good cryptonym, don't we? We do. Of a plot he's going to come up with is DB Achilles.

Solid. One of the problems, as you said, is they don't have great sources close to Saddam. And so they end up working with exiles. And here we get to one of the important figures in our story of the buildup to the war. an exile named Ahmed Chalabi. And Chalabi is a really interesting and important character. And I do think he is your classic kind of exile plotter, isn't he? I mean, he comes from a wealthy Iraqi family which had fled after the revolution in the 50s.

He's eloquent. He's politically astute. He's a schemer. He's smart. He attends MIT. So he's got the American education because he's got a maths doctorate from University of Chicago. runs a bank, but that bank is running out of Jordan collapses amid allegations of fraud at the end of the 80s, so it's a little bit shady. But by the 90s, he's running something called the Iraqi

National Congress, the INC. And he basically wants to be the next leader of Iraq. And he's also got in the early 90s a relationship with the CIA. And he's not really a recruited agent or asset like we often discuss in this program. He's really, it seems like he's more of a kind of paid agent of influence, probably as part of this covert action campaign against Saddam, because Chalabi is, of course, looking for, looking to position himself as a future leader in Iraq after Saddam has gone. Interestingly, Chalabi also has clandestine relationships with Iranian intelligence,

who he's talking to as well. So he's skeebing. He's playing all sides, hoping to see where his chips might land. Yeah. So he's working with Bear on this plot. He's working with a guy called Wafiqa Samurai, who's a former head of Iraqi military intelligence who says he can all help organize a coup. And it's interesting because Chalaby is hoping that he can spark something, you know, through a small uprising, a small military maneuver, which will either start a coup or pull the US or the Iranians to come in and finish the job and get rid of Saddam. So that's his kind of ambition and his plan. But he's playing all these games.

I mean, Chalaby tells the Iranians that Bob Bear, the CIA man, is planning to assassinate Saddam. And he tells the Iranians this in order to kind of make the Iranians think that this is a serious plot, that he's engaged with and that they should support it because it's going to happen because Saddam's going to go on so you might as well come in. But it's not true. But the NSA, so America's Signals intelligence agency intercepts details of the Iranians discussing this plan, apparently of Bob Bear of the CIA, to assassinate Saddam. And of course, Washington then absolutely freaks out because believe it or not, the CIA is not supposed to go around assassinating foreign heads of state without permission. And so suddenly they're like, what is going on? What is going on? And they are like,

they freak out of Bob Bear and they're like, you blindsided us about this. The National Security Advisor fears. This whole plot is going to go wrong. It's going to turn into another bay of pigs and, you know, the exiles are going to get moan down and they're going to get drawn in and fail to do things. And so they pull the plug on the plot. There's Chalabies people. There's a brief battle, but, you know, no insurrection. Bob Bear, fear. And he writes about this in a memoir, that he's then hung out to dry. And it's part of the kind of dark mess that is the CIA plots. There's another plot in 1996, we should say, inside Iraq, which also goes badly wrong and

where the plotters are executed. And Saddam has penetrated all of these. So it's a kind of mess that's going on with these plans to try and get rid of Saddam. One of the data imics that I find really interesting is that even, though, I mean, seen from the CIA side, the American side, you'd say, none of this stuff gets even remotely close to actually orchestrating a successful coup. And yet Saddam can read all of this as the Americans being intensely involved in Iraqi politics, being kind of all seeing, all knowing, able to pull strings all over the place. So it reinforces in Saddam's mind

this idea that the Americans know exactly what's going on. and are out to get him. And yet, this was a shocking fact, and it came out of the Cole book, the Achillesstrap. Steve Cole wasn't able to find any official contact between the U.S. and Iraqi governments between 19, direct contact between 1990 and the beginning of the war in 2003. And so there's this, there's this massive chasm between the two sides as they circle each other. The extent of misunderstanding is remarkable here on both the American and Iraqi side. Yeah, and what it does is give an outsized role to people like Chalaby and these exiles, yeah, as being the people who claim to be speaking for the people of Iraq and the truth about what's going on in Iraq.

And it's interesting because after these plots kind of fall apart, the CIA cuts ties with Chalabi. They consider him so untrustworthy. And what does he do? He moves to London, comes to Mayfair, opens up an office. I think it was more a Knightsbridge at one point, but I kind of remember visiting it. But he also plays Washington really well, Chalaby. I mean, he's very good at building support in Congress, in think tanks, and I have to say, amongst a lot of journalists in Washington particularly to try and build support for his case,

that Saddam's a bad man. Saddam should be getting rid of. The Clinton administration has been too soft on him. We need to take a harder line. He's always telling people, you know, the Iraqi people will welcome you Americans as liberators. And he's also doing this other thing, which we're definitely going to come back to,

which is that he is becoming, he's not just becoming the conduit for defectors from the regime who are making claims about what the regime's up to. He's actively seeking out defectors. he's running offices in places like Jordan looking for people coming out of Iraq who he can use to make his case that Saddam's a bad man and should be gotten rid of because of his WMD or because of his brutality. And I suppose that the existence of people like Chalabi and their ability to kind of sit at the middle of these Iraqi networks and Western networks means that there's not an incentive for anybody to, to defect from Iraq and, for example, to say, we shut down all of the WMD programs. You're creating a market for defectors to come out and say maybe things that were historically

accurate about what Saddam had done with WMD or the brutality of the regime, but things that may not be accurate anymore because that is exactly what Chalabi wants to hear so he can sell his product, which is regime change, to London and to Washington. Yeah, Robert Draper's very good book, to start a war, mentions one case of a general who claims to have fled Iraq and he says he's got evidence of Saddam Hussein training terrorists. But he said he fled

after Saddam's son Uday smashed his testicles apart. And so what happens is of course the Americans they check his testicles, which is one way of checking. And there's no damage, they're fine. And he'd been basically coached

or been in contact with Chalaby who told him to tell this story. I mean, it's a fairly basic thing. I mean, if you're going to sound convincing, you need to take a hammer to your testicles if you're going to try that line. Because otherwise, someone's going to check. Maybe his testicles just healed quickly. Anyhow, the 1990s, we're in the 1990s, tension is growing over the inspections that are ongoing, the unscommon inspections that are ongoing inside Iraq. Now, the main worry at the time is CW and BW, chemical weapons and biological weapons, not as much nuclear.

But there's also, isn't there, a deliberate policy of the US to use the inspections to try to provoke Saddam? Yeah, this is where it gets really interesting, I think, because the inspectors are technically UN inspectors, but a lot of them do come from the US and the UK. And there's some very aggressive ones, famous one called Scott Ritter, who are working quite closely with Washington. And one of the things that, for instance, they're doing is targeting. something called the Special Security Organization, which is Saddam's elite group of bodyguards is the wrong word, but it's the group designed to protect him, his palaces and key institutions. Now the inspectors are saying that they think this group is being used to hide the WMD, particularly hide it in Saddam's presidential palaces.

And they are trying to use aggressive inspections to put it off balance. But of course, from the Iraqi side, they are very resistant to let inspectors into Saddam's presidential palaces because their job is to protect Saddam and they view the inspectors as spies who are gathering intelligence about Saddam's palaces and his whereabouts and his security, which they can then use to target him as part of their plots. So you see this tension and to some extent misunderstanding. And to be fair to the Iraqis, they're kind of right because the UN inspectors are packed. It's packed full of spies. I mean, I've heard stories about unscgon being used as cover to hide, you know, comms gear for spying and tracking equipment, all these things. And that the US, you know, CIA and others are using the inspectors to collect military targeting information.

So it's kind of true that the inspectors are more than just inspectors because they're being supplied by countries who have their own agenda. And going back to the logic for Saddam to let these inspectors in and to have destroyed his stockpiles in the first place, Saddam's idea was that if he plays ball, he'll get the sanctions relief that he wants to get Iraq's economy and cash flow out from under Iraq, essentially. and use that to raise money, right? But this isn't working for him, is it? By the time we get to 97-98, it's becoming clear to him and to the regime that he's not getting any of the relief

that he thought he would get. Yeah, so the tension is growing. He knows the CIA is plotting to overthrow him. He sees these inspectors coming around his palaces. And his attitude is, well, why help with inspections if the sanctions are not being lifted, and there's no sign of them being lifted anyway. And Jafar, the nuclear scientist, says,

Saddam basically decides at this point that the idea of getting the sanctions lifted through cooperating with inspections isn't working. So why bother cooperating with inspectors? You know, why have them in rooting around your palaces if you're not going to get a clean bill of health anyway and they're just causing trouble? So he basically decides, well,

screw you to the inspectors. So October 1998, Saddam suspends cooperation with the inspectors. They're withdrawn. And then the US and UK carry out airstrikes called Operation Desert Fox, where they bomb and hit some targets. And this is another big moment on the on the road to the eventual WMD intelligence failure in 2002, 2003, because through the 1990s, there hadn't been much need for independent intelligence gathering by the US and the UK, or at least it's a bit diminished because of the presence of the inspectors. But now, with the inspectors gone, you've actually lost a collection platform. And you don't have an embassy in the case of either the U.S. or the U.K., inside Iraq at this time. So you were blinded. I mean, you were, you were

already not in a great spot from a collection standpoint. And now you've been even more blinded by the ejection of these inspectors. So from a collection standpoint in this period, it's also getting a bit grim. The inspectors were the kind of closest thing they had to eyes and ears, particularly when it came to WMD. Now they've lost them after 1998. And you're right, the source base in Iraq is surprisingly thin. I mean, the CIA had just two sources reporting from inside Iraq, one could only communicate by mailing letters to an address in Yemen. So the information would sometimes be like months out of date. And the other could only communicate when he comes out of the country every six months. I mean, it's not a deep source base, is it? There were probably

more sources attached to the covert action program, I would think. But my guess is that this is referring to sources in Baghdad who were able to report on military capabilities, plans and intentions of the regime, that kind of thing. But it is. That is very thin. That is, that's, that's, that's not, it was a little bit better on the UK side. And it will come, we'll come back to that angle later. But, but still, Iraq is, it's a bit of a backwater, isn't it? That's right. I think backwater is the right word. The head of MI6, uh, from 1999 is a guy called Sir Richard Dearloaf. And we're going to, uh, talk a lot more about him. And we're going to be hearing from him in the bonus episode.

for members, so do join up at the rest is classified.com if you want to hear that. But he says, you know, the intelligence picture on Iraq was, I would say, neglected. You know, that's his verdict on that period through the 1990s. Because it's way down the list of priorities for the Joint Intelligence Committee, which is the august body which sets Britain's priorities for its spies of what to collect. By some accounts, it's like 20th on the list of priorities for the Joint Intelligence Committee at that period in the late 90s. So it's low down the requirements. You've got a intelligence base. Britain does have a couple of sources, a little bit more maybe than the Americans. We'll come back to that as well. And so what you have, and I think this is important, is if you're,

if you haven't got any new information, what you're left with is basically history and assumptions of what you knew to be the case in the past. This is a really important distinction for this entire story, which is when do assumptions drift, kind of creep into becoming actual analytic judgments? And it can happen in a case like this where you have historical information, you have a, you know, sort of political, cultural, historical context for this country, this leader. And yet you don't actually have recent intelligence on what. what they're planning to do, what their capabilities might be. And in that kind of, in that kind of situation, it's quite easy for an analytic cadre.

It could be in the U.S., it could be in the UK, could be anywhere, to fall into this trap. Because, like, for example, the CIA has put out a kind of tradecraft primer after a ROCWMD. And one of the things they looked at was to write out in some interesting historical cases, strategic assumptions that were not challenged. So for example, in 1941, there was an assumption that more or less went like this with respect to Japan. Japan would avoid all-out war because it recognized U.S. military superiority. But using the same set of information, you could have made the case, given that U.S. superiority would only increase, Japan might view a first strike as the only way to knock America out of the war. And in,

in the Iraq WMD case, the assumption was that Saddam failed to cooperate with UN inspectors. He tosses him out because he's continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction. And yet, consistent with the same body of information would be if Iraqi authorities had destroyed their WMD stocks and abandoned their programs, they might refuse to fully acknowledge this to the UN to maintain Iraq's regional status, deterrence, and internal regime stability. that claim would be consistent with all of the information, but the strategic assumption that has held for years at this point goes unchallenged and actually becomes the analytic line. And then it becomes very hard to change because it gets all of the analysts, the collectors, the policymakers get locked into that mindset. That assumption underlies their mindset about that country. And it becomes very hard in the absence of a whole bunch of new and compelling information to change it.

Yeah. I think that's exactly right. the assumptions get hardened. And so as we get to this point in the late 90s, Iraq is still under sanctions, the population is suffering. Saddam is using this as propaganda to blame the West. There is this thing called the oil for food program through the UN to try and get food to people, but that's subject of massive corruption. In the US and UK, the secret policy is regime change, but in practice, the diplomatic policy is containment, but there's a growing sense it's not working and it might not be sustainable in the long run, but no one's really got an alternative.

They're not really kind of going for regime chain all out. So Saddam is thinking, well, you know, the most that will happen now, I've got rid of inspections, is maybe occasionally I'll get some airstrikes, but in the long term, I'm going to be okay because the appetite to keep this regime of sanctions and the suffering of the people going is going to eventually crumble, and then I'll be free. And it's not unreasonable to presume that that gamble may have paid off, but in two, 2001, two very, very big things happen. We have a new administration taking power in Washington that is led by George W. Bush, the son of George H.W. Bush, who first went to war with Saddam

back in 91. That administration, the new George W. Bush administration is, of course, full of people who have an agenda with respect to Iraq and who are out to get Saddam. And then, of course, on September 11, 2001, the U.S. is attacked in a way that will change everything in the way the U.S. conducts foreign and national security policy. Yes, and even though Saddam Hussein was not behind that attack, there will be some in Washington who want to claim he was and will want to immediately put Iraq in Washington's sites for regime change. So that will be next time on the rest is classified. But a reminder, you don't. have to wait. You can join the Declassified Club at the rest is classified.com where you get

early access to the series and some really, really exclusive and very interesting guests who will be speaking to us on those bonus episodes for club members, right? They're David. That's right. We've set up three incredible interviews for club members that are tied to this series that I think will give listeners a really inside view of how this entire, really this entire story in the run-up to the war went down. We have an interview with Alistair Campbell, who was the head of Tony Blair's communications shop in the run-up to the war, with Sir Richard Dearlove, who was the chief of MI6 in the run-up to the war, and Michael Morrell, who was one of the top three analysts at the CIA at the time and intimately involved

in the intelligence picture and the relationship between the White House and CIA in the run-up to the war. So members of the Declassified Club will get access to all of that and can get access to all of that right now. We also, reminder, have a live show on September 4th and 5th in London. You can get tickets for that at the rest is classified.com. Look forward to see you next time. See you next time.