The Rest Is Classified - 155. The Road to Iraq: How 9/11 Changed Everything (Ep 3)

Episode Date: May 10, 2026

How significant a role did 9/11 play in the decision to go to war in Iraq? And why did Tony Blair commit to standing by George W. Bush “no matter what”? Listen as David and Gordon continue their series on Iraq WMD, charting the moment the West’s relationship with the Middle East changed, forever. ------------------- 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. Why did George W. Bush and Tony Blair decide to go to war with Iraq? And why did the 9-11 attacks turn the Bush administration's sights toward removing Saddam Hussein? Well, welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm David McCloskey. And I'm Gordon Carrera. And we are in our third episode of our six-part series exploring this incredibly fascinating and tragic topic of Iraq WMD and the role that that intelligence played in the case for invading Iraq in 2003.

Last time we had looked at this period of the 1990s when Iraq is under this inspections regime and yet it has destroyed. all of its chemical weapons and biological weapons, its stockpiles, its programs, it has halted its nuclear program. And Saddam Hussein has made the very interesting, shall we say, decision to essentially get rid of all of his WMD and yet to keep that secret, not tell the UN inspectors, not tell the Americans so that he can preserve deterrence in the region and make himself appear stronger in the Middle East. And so we have this kind of fateful clash that is coming here with a new U.S. administration in power, the 9-11 attacks having happened. And we're going to be looking at,

in this episode, at the proximate run-up to why the U.S. decides to attack Iraq, and importantly, why the UK follows. 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, intelligent services look for. And running a business is the same, especially when you're building or growing a team. It's the risks you can't see or don't understand. HP designs technology, so devices, collaboration tools and security work together as a single system, helping teams keep everything running smoothly at home in the office and out in the field.

The protection is built in. Hardware level security working quietly in the background, helping reduce risk without creating more work. With a team of business advisors, HP helps businesses of all sizes, find technology that fits their needs and budget. To see how HP helps businesses work securely and productively, visit HP.com forward slash classified. The rest is classified listeners also benefit from 10% off HP business technology with code T-R-I-C-10. That's right. We left in 2001, and it is tempting to root that decision to attack Iraq simply in the attacks of 9-11. But actually, I do think you need to go back a little bit earlier to the

start of that Bush administration, because regime change actually had been the official policy of the U.S. back to the 1990s. So you had that covert action finding right after the First Gulf War. But in 1998, there's a very public thing called the Iraq Liberation Act, which is pushed by exiles like Ahmed Chalabi, we talked about last time, passed by Congress, to say this is our policy and there'd been ill-fated covert actions. But when that new Bush administration starts in January 2001, it is already keen to push harder than before for regime change. And I think one of the reasons is the people. And let's go through the cast list, because This cast list is fascinating and important.

First of all, the man himself, George W. Bush, arrives in office, former governor of the great state of Texas. I've got to say that, haven't I? You do. You're contractually obligated to say that. That's right. Contractually obligated to say that, or else you'll object. But I guess the important things about him is his father had been president, first Gulf War, and had been very experienced in foreign policy. The younger George W. Bush, less so, elected on a domestic agenda, very. close election, of course. I remember this, the Florida recount. Do you remember you're hanging

chads, which sounds like something else, but was hanging chads were type of ballot paper where the chad, the dimple hadn't been quite pushed through? And the question was, was that a legitimate vote or not? And it got down to that in Florida as to whether he would or Al Gore would win the presidency. And it's a kind of one of the great what ifs, if 600 votes difference in Florida, Al Gore's president, you know, do we have Iraq and everything else? But anyway, he is, certainly a very important figure in our story. Next up in this roster is the vice president, Dick Cheney, who had been the defense secretary in the first Gulf War. Fair to say, I think he is at this point in Republican circles of foreign policy heavyweight. He has very

strong views, tends to have hawkish views, which would probably be no surprise to any of our listers. Cheney had been a big wig in the oil services firm Halliburton while out of government. in the 1990s. And during those years, had taken, kind of absorbed a darker view of the world, the threats America faced, the need to confront them, people who listen to our Blockhawk Down series. And in particular, the bonus episode, we actually talk about the film, will recall that, I mean, Chady using events like Mogadishu and the U.S. retreat from Somalia to paint a picture of a really dark and scary world where US power is necessary, U.S. influence is necessary to kind of stave off these sorts of threats.

And an ally, I suppose, of Cheney is Donald Rumsfeldt, who's the defense secretary, had been defense secretary before, and had once actually been Dick Cheney's boss. He's a wily, he's a brilliant bureaucratic operator. He's a former wrestler at Princeton. Now, another one of my weird facts, as well as meeting the man who I in Saddam's shirts in Cairo, I also once met someone who wrestled against Donald Rumsfeld. And it was very interesting because this guy said to me, I once at Thanksgiving dinner in New England with this guy, and he said to me, Donald Rumsfeld, when you wrestled against him, was incredibly aggressive, but he also only had one move.

And I thought that's like a kind of great, great picture of what Rumsfeld was like, aggressive, but basically one move once you worked it out. You also had Colin Powell, as the same. Secretary of State. He had been chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the First Gulf War. The so-called Powell Doctrine had been developed after Vietnam. Fair to say, it has now been ditched by 2026 over the Iran War, Operation Epic Fury. The Powell doctrine was you only go in, only use military force when you have clear objectives and then you use overwhelming force. Colin Powell is popular, but he's less hawkish than Chady or Rumsfeld.

Yeah. And then you have George Tenet, don't you, as CIA director? Maybe you should talk about him because Tenet is an interesting character because he's a holdover from the Clinton administration, isn't he? He's a bureaucratic officer. He's risen up as a staffer on the National Security Council to become CIA director and is perhaps surprised when he's held over from Clinton to Bush. It is kind of amazing to think of an era where you would have senior national security officials who could serve. both Republican and Democratic administrations. You know, I think maybe similar to a Leon Panetta type character was seen as the sort of person who was able to, who generated a lot of political top cover for the agency. It was a bureaucratic knife fighter because he was essentially a creature of, you know, sort of Washington committees and the National Security Council and knew how the business ran and was very fond of walking around with an unlit cigar in his,

mouth or in his pocket. And, you know, he's, he was and is a very highly respected former director of the CIA. But of course, the accusation in this period will be that, you know, he gets too close to the customer. Yeah. You have this tension. We've talked about this in some of the interviews we've done with former CIA directors where you have this tension of you're representing the CIA and the view of the CIA. You're trying to speak. truth to power, but at the same time, you're a political appointee who is serving at the pleasure of the president. And there is a tension, I think, in the between the kind of objective intelligence that you're supposed to be bringing and the policy that the president might be favoring or pushing.

Those can come in conflict with one another. Yeah, I think he had to saying, don't lose the customer, the customer being the president with the United States. And then you've also got national security advisors, Condi Rice, super smart, Stanford professor expert on Russian. And her. job is to kind of corral all these really significant big beasts in... It's a rough job. In foreign policy, but that is a rough job. And I think the feeling was she was struggling with that.

And then also, within the bureaucracy inside the system, but also some outside, you have what are called the neocons who are, I guess they're hawks who support using military force to reshape the world. They have this view that America has the ability, almost the duty, to do things like reshape the Middle East to spread. democracy and freedom. Most importantly, I think, is Paul Wolfowitz, who was deputy secretary of defense, so deputy to Rumsfeld. And I think one of the things that's interesting, if you go through that list, is that lots of them already have reasons to have kind of beef with Saddam Hussein already,

don't they? Because, you know, Powell, Cheney, Rumsfeld, you know, these are all people who've dealt with Saddam Hussein, dealt with the First Gulf War, and have strong views. And you have George W. Bush, who's dad did the first Gulf War. So you already have, I think, this really interesting collection of people summer of 2001. So before 9-11, a guy called Luis Rueda was made head of the Iraq Operations Group at the CIA. So that is the group tasked with doing, if you like, the regime change bit of things. And he's, again, a really interesting character. His father had been part of the Bay of Pigs invasion. So Cuban exile. And the family had then settled in the US after the failure of Bay of Pigs.

He was no expert on Iraq when he's given this job in the summer of 2001. So why is he's put there? And the answer is he's got experience in running covert action programs in Latin America. So arming and training exiles and running coups. And so the aim already then in the summer of 2001 is use exiles, use this COVID action

to basically cause what one person described as mayhem to destabilize the regime in Iraq. That's the plan. And then, of course, with this new administration having been in office, not even a year, 9-11 happens. Seismic event, it's maybe hard for younger listeners to appreciate just how much American society and politics changed in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. It completely reshapes the way that the administration thinks about how it might use military

force and where. Yeah. How much risk are you willing to tolerate after 9-11? 9-11, it goes way down, right? And so you have a totally reshaped worldview and mindset on the part of the Bush administration officials that we've just talked about, even though immediately after the attack, it's clear that it's al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. That is not ambiguous within just a few days of 9-11.

And yet, it's striking, isn't it, Gordon, that within days, you have very senior people. in the Bush administration who raised the idea of attacking Iraq. Yeah, it's kind of crazy looking back. I mean, September the 15th, top national security officials meet at Camp David, the president's retreat, to discuss how to respond to 9-11. And Paul Wolferwitz, this neocon deputy secretary of defense, says there is at least 10, maybe 50 percent chance that Iraq was involved in 9-11. I mean, what's that mean? 10 to 50. It's a wide, a wide margin.

Even though everyone knows it's al-Qaeda. Everyone knows it's al-Qaeda. But I think what I attribute it to is a group of people who have long wanted to get rid of Saddam, who see this as the opportunity to do it. Wolfowitz says, we've got to make sure we go ahead and get Saddam out at the same time. It's a perfect opportunity. And it's interesting because at that meeting, you know, President Bush gets angry. And he says, how many times do I have to tell you we're not going after Iraq right at

at this minute. He says that to Wolfowitz. And I think the key phrase in that is at this minute. Bush is not saying he doesn't want to do it. He's just saying, just not yet, you know, we've got to kind of deal with the immediate threat first. Even on September the 26th, he asked Rumsfeld, Defense Secretary, speak with him alone in the Oval Office. And Rumsfeld will say the president leaned back in the black leather chair behind his desk and ask that I take a look at the shape of our military plans on Iraq. It's fascinating, isn't it? That quick place, I remember picking this up at the time, I was in Washington. People were talking about the need to go after Iraq.

The Brits are hearing this and of course would rather focus on Afghanistan because bin Laden, a lot of Al-Qaeda had been in Afghanistan prior to 9-11, offered sanctuary by the Taliban. And so the very obvious military target after 9-11 is to go and eliminate al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and its sanctuary and take the Taliban out. In October, our top CIA officers over in London for memorial service for a former MI6 chief. And it seems like MI6 is really pushing for the Afghanistan focused, not Iraq, probably some concern on the part of MI6 and the Brits about these little rumbles about going after Iraq. And an MI6 officer tells a CI counterpart, if you go into Iraq, it's really going to

complicate things. Well, it turned out to be a major understatement of what happens. And Bush tells Blair that when we've dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq. So there really is this obsessive focus inside the Bush administration with Saddam Hussein. Yeah. And by November, the Taliban is on the run in Afghanistan. And Afghanistan is nearly done. And so immediately, Iraq is back at the top of the agenda. You know, that quickly by November, it's like, okay, what next? And the answer is Iraq. But why? I think, forgive the stupid question, but this really is important.

Yeah. Why Iraq? I think it's worth running through some of the different theories. And I think the truth is there are lots of reasons for different people which all coincide. So I think one, which we've touched on, is this sense of unfinished business that some of the key players were involved in Gulf War I. They regret not finishing the job in Gulf War I and leaving Saddam Hussein in place. And they want to finish it. And I think for President George W. Bush, there is also a slight psychodrama. I think people are perhaps right in thinking this, that, you know, it's hard to speak for someone's own mind. But do it anyway, Gordon. Do it anyway. Let's do it anyway. The son finishing the job his father didn't do. It's to some extent, I'm going to complete what my father didn't do, which is get rid of this bad man. So it's showing I'm my own man and I can even do something he didn't do. There's also mixed in with this, but distinct, the neocom worldview. Yeah. And the. idea here is let's transform the Middle East, starting with Iraq, Iraq or the big boys on

the block. The Iraqis are antagonistic toward our friends in the region. So let's take Saddam out and use it as an almost domino effect to spread more open society as democracy and freedom and protect our friends in the Middle East. That's kind of the Wolfowitz view of the world and Iraq, which is a kind of weird mix of idealistic, the idea you really can spread democracy and everyone will welcome you, you know, and you can create democracy and freedom, which at the time people believed, and it's harder to understand that now, but that was a view, along with a very hawkish view, which is you do this at the barrel of a gun, you do it through force. So I think that's definitely another view. Then you get another one, which I think is

maybe one which Cheney and Rumsfeld are less if you like neocons, but they are more people who want to restore American deterrence post 9-11. I think there is this sense which America has been hit really badly on 9-11, and they just want to hit back. To some extent, it sounds weird, but I think Afghanistan wasn't big enough to do to show that America was back and capable of taking on its enemies. It was almost too small. Whereas I think taking down Iraq, that is a message, which is don't mess with us because we're going to go after our enemies.

There's also this other idea which Iraq was linked to al-Qaeda. Yeah. Which didn't turn out so well in retrospect that we should say is total nonsense. But there was a lot of pressure on the CIA to find a link. And I think this gets back to, and maybe this is a bit of a mix of a number of these different theories, it seems like there was a reflection inside the administration that we had been hit by this terrorist group. And terrorism was a scourge. Terrorism was going to be a constant threat and risk.

We're going to keep getting hit by terrorist groups. All of this is emanating in the Middle East. We have to rework the Middle East so that we don't get hit by these groups. And the way to rework the Middle East is to take the biggest, baddest guy down and put something new in his place. And it's great if you're trying to justify a conflict with Saddam, it would be ideal if there actually were direct links between Saddam and the people who had just attacked America on 9-11. Yeah. In fact, most of the hijackers, the majority are Saudi citizens. But of course, Saudi is U.S. allies.

So no one wants to point to that. So they are looking for some way of linking Iraq to the attack. And there was this claim that maybe the leader of the hijackers, Mohammed Atta, had met an Iraqi official in Prague. But there's nothing to it. The Brits push back on this. I mean, Richard Dearlove, head of MI6 at the time, who we're going to be talking to us on a bonus episode, is reported to have called it bollocks, which is a British phrase for...

Thank you. I didn't know. It sounded like gibberish to me, Gordon. Thanks for translating. For not true. I mean, my favorite story is that a Greek woman turns up claiming to have been Saddam's lover and that in the 80s, she said she'd seen a tall, bearded man at one of the palaces.

And when she'd ask Saddam's son, the son had said, that's a Psalm bin Laden. And it turns out she was being, you know, pushed around by Ahmed Chalabi's exile group, the INC. Classic example of trying to, you know, find someone who can support a theory. But we can dismiss the Al-Qaeda link pretty quickly.

But the WMD issue is going to be the one, isn't it? Because I think that's what's so interesting. You haven't got a direct link to 9-11, as in to al-Qaeda and the attacks. And so what you get is this idea that it's the fear of weapons of mass destruction, getting into the hands of terrorists like al-Qaeda, that is one way of justifying going after Iraq because it's presumed to be developing these weapons of mass destruction

and is a nasty regime. So it's a way of linking, isn't it, 9-11 terrorists and Iraq, through this nexus of WMD. And there's an appetite among many in the administration, in particular someone like Cheney, for dealing with really high impact risks that also might be low probability. There's a willingness and a desire to use military force

to, in their view, eliminate these risks because even if they're not likely to happen, even if it's not likely that Saddam would peddle WMD to terrorist groups, if there's a 1% chance of doing it, well, then you've got to go solve the problem. That's the post-9-11. That's the new mindset. Yeah, exactly.

That's the new mindset. And you do get things like you get anthrax appearing in the post in the US after 9-11. It doesn't turn out to be Iraq, even though people for a few days think, well, maybe it's the Iraqis. You know, maybe they've posted this anthrax to senators and media folk. But it's part of that kind of wild fear post-9-11 about what could happen. And as Kabul falls in Afghanistan, this intelligence that bin Laden might have met with former members of Pakistan's nuclear program. You've got intelligence about AQ Khan coming in, you know, selling nuclear technology

to other states. So it's part of this mix of fears about WND at the time. The issue is not that Saddam is more of a threat in a sense, but the tolerance, as you put it, you know, that tolerance for any risk has changed in Washington. You're right. And Saddam's weapons programs were in reality. no more of a threat after 9-11 than they had been before. And in fact, spoiler alert, Saddam had not reconstituted these programs,

but the world has entirely changed. And really importantly, Saddam doesn't appreciate this in the least, we should say. Now, Mike Morel, President Bush's PDB, president's daily briefer on 9-11, and was with Bush on 9-11. By the time we get into 2002-2003 has become one of the top three analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence at CIA. Morell is quoted by Steve Cole in his book, The Achilles Trap, as saying, quote, the president's thinking on Iraq was motivated by the soul-crushing impact of 9-11 and the legitimate fear that as bad as 9-11 had been, things could be much worse.

If Saddam got it into his head to either use his weapons of mass destruction as a terrorist tool against the West, or provide those weapons to an international terrorist group. These dire scenarios were unlikely, U.S. intelligence analysts believed, yet Bush concluded that they were risks he could not ignore. There is a logical fallacy to this, which is why would Saddam, even if he had the WMD, give them to al-Qaeda? And in reality, Saddam, like lots of Arab leaders, hated al-Qaeda. He fears the Islamists.

They're not his friends, are they? I mean, they are actually enemies because al-Qaeda bin Laden hates these regimes which are secular, which are Arab nationalist. You know, he wants a different type of regime, doesn't they? So there is a bit of this which just doesn't actually make sense. It's hard to put yourself back in the mindset of the American government in the immediate period after 9-11. It was really paranoid panicked time. And it was very, very difficult to separate real threats from stuff that was just totally, totally blown up. But what about Saddam?

What is Saddam doing during this period? He doesn't seem to be that worried. And it goes back to something we've talked about before, is he doesn't really understand America. He doesn't know that much about it. I suppose he didn't have anything to do with 9-11. So he probably thinks. So what? They know that and I'm good.

I didn't. Yeah, the all-powerful CIA knows I didn't do it. So what's the problem? He doesn't get, I think, the fact that 9-11 has changed America. His main focus, David, and you'll appreciate this. His main focus is changing career to some extent to being a novelist, something you and Saddam have in common, which is, you know, a desire to tell stories. And by the way, we should say, for people who aren't familiar with Saddam, I'm saying,

Gordon is not joking. Saddam Hussein has become a novelist in this period. And it is, you're right, I didn't appreciate until we started digging into the series how similar my life experience is to Saddam Hussein because we both left government service to become novelists. So he and I share that bond. He doesn't leave government service. I mean, that's part of going.

I know. I exaggerated it. You exaggerate. But he actually, people do. He was devoting more of his time. Like he was stepping away from running the country day to day because he wants to write his novelist. I mean, we talked a lot about poets because we've had a lot of poets,

haven't we? Like Bin Laden was a poet. But for Saddam, it was novels. And his romance novel, which I'm sure has been a big influence on you, Zabiba and the King had just been published in 2000, all about a common girl who falls for a lonely king in medieval to Crete. I think it's supposed to be some kind of allegory for Iraq, isn't it? I kind of think. I'm not quite sure. It is. It's set in ancient Babylon.

Okay. It is about a married king who falls in love with a young, beautiful, and wise woman named Zabiba. I would describe it as a polemical allegory in which Zabiba is a rock and the king of Saddam. It is also not a very well-hidden or subtle allegory. It's very clear that the king of Saddam and Zabiba is the nation of Iraq. And through this story, it is ostensibly a love story, but I would describe the romance in this novel as being rather dull. It's certainly no 50 shades of gray. And throughout this story, the king, again, Saddam, learns how to be a better ruler. And so there are a lot of lessons that Zabiba imparts on the king about how to run the country in a wise fashion. Zabiba has a brutal husband, who is quite obviously a stand-in for the United States of America in the

story. And Zaviba and the King has published anonymously, but everybody in Iraq knows exactly who the writer was. I think the CIA believed that it was ghostwritten, but it's not. He really wrote it. He meticulously wrote it by hand, and then he would deliver a few pages at a time to his press secretary for copy editing, a task that if I were the press secretary, I would have been, I would have done with extreme trepidation. Yeah, I think so. It sells a million copies, which, you know, I mean, it maybe helps if you're president. But I think that's like, that's McCloskey level sales.

That was pretty good. And being turned into a play around this time of 9-11 and 20-part TV series. A 20-part TV series. So that's Saddam. So he's like only kind of half paying attention to this. My view of Saddam Hussein at the time was that you had this madman military dictator who was totally in control of the country and spending all of his time basically cooking WMD and plotting vicious, you know, vicious political intrigue.

Just to emphasize the reality of Saddam Hussein's life at the same time as 9-11 is that he is spending most of his days writing novels. He's obviously still very paranoid, clearly, and deeply afraid of assassination plots, and he is still in control of Iraq. He is spending most of his time writing novels. Yeah. In the run-up to the war. It's nuts.

Yeah, it is nuts. But I guess the question is you've got all these different motives, but how are you going to justify it? Because it's no good saying to the public, oh, we just, you know, unfinished business, you know, all these things. It's not 2026. You can't attack a country with... Imagine. There was a time when you needed a reason. Unbelievable.

And you needed one reason and to stick to it rather than like five different reasons which you put out every day. And so the answer, I guess, is that they settle on is weapons of mass destruction. I think this is also really interesting because just after the war, Paul Wolfowitz, it does an interview with Vanity Fair. And he says, for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on, weapons of mass destruction. I just think it's such an interesting insight. If we're going to pick one to make the

case for, to the public about why to get rid of Saddam, we're going to pick weapons of mass destruction. I suppose that makes sense. Given the different personalities we talked about, the different reasons to potentially take down Saddam, you'd have people who wanted to do it purely based off of ideology around the use of military force and the promotion of democracy and freedom, and that you have other people who maybe do think that Saddam's connected to 9-11, and you have others who see Saddam is kind of a stain because he was left in power after the 91 war. So you have a bunch of different competing reasons for it, but they could probably all agree that Saddam still has weapons of mass destruction and therefore represents a significant

and threat to, you know, the U.S. and to our partners in the region. And there you go. Lowest common denominator. Yeah. And also, if you're making it to the public, I think you can link it to terrorism. You can link it to this idea. WM.D. might get into the hands of the terrorists and threaten another worse 9-11, which is a kind of powerful argument, even though, as we said, it's kind of, there's a fallacy to it. You've got the advantage of you think you've got evidence for it. Think. We'll come back to that, obviously. And also, and I think this is important, It's what your allies want, particularly the UK, because for them, focusing on weapons of mass destruction, has a real advantage because you can say this is all about enforcing UN resolutions to say he must disarm.

Well, I think that's a good spot to take a break and we come back. We'll see how the UK and Prime Minister Tony Blair in particular become not just partners in the war, but play an outsized role. in the intelligence justification for the conflict. 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. Ooh, 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 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. Gordon Carrera has succeeded in taking us down a UK detour in this otherwise apple pie Americana story about a failed war in Iraq.

Well, I'm afraid in this story, the two countries are bound tightly together, unlike in the current epic fury of Iran, This were different times. And I think that's what's so interesting about this story as well is Tony Blair and British intelligence play such an important role in this conflict and in the justification for the conflict and this question of WMD. So let's do.

Tony Blair has been first elected in 1997, re-elected June 2001, so just before 9-11. And he's arguably at the peak of his powers. Abroad, it's the era of liberal interventionism. Blair has been quite successful in this. And notably, he pushed Bill Clinton to intervene in the Balkans over Kosovo. And that ends up being a successful intervention. And Blair, I think, Fields. He guided the Americans.

And this is his model. So you've got this new president, George W. Bush, who's less experienced. And he was desperate to do something after 9-11. So you can see, for Tony Blair, post-9-11, this is his moment on the world stage. He enjoyed being, in his words, a big player. And he tells his Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, my job is to steer them, the U.S., in a sensible path. I think it's a really interesting phrase, isn't it?

He sees his role as guiding this new administration. Are they overselling UK influence here? I mean, we talked about this in the last episode where Maggie Thatcher is bucking up H.W. Bush and enforcing... He's a good question. The first Gulf War. Yeah. Yeah. And I think this period is.

is one of the peaks of British influence. Now, I still agree with you. It's still maybe oversold at certain points. But I think Blair really does have some influence in Washington at this point. We talked about the cast list in Washington of, you know, Powell, Cheney, Rumsfeld. You could almost put Blair in the mix there as one of those players in Washington who has influence in his own way. Yeah. It's also, I mean, Blair does have some of the same nightmares as those in Washington about terrorists and weapons of mass destruction.

and joining with catastrophic consequences. And he also, his critics say he becomes more messianic over time, but he does have these big ideas that there is a big struggle in the world between different forces and there's a need to modernise the Middle East. And he is coming from a liberal interventionist world. But in an interesting way, it does overlap, you can see, with the neocom world for you. And by late 2001, it is becoming clear to him, everyone in London, that the US is talking about Iraq.

Now, another big character on our story here is the chief of MI6, Sir Richard Dearloaf, worth setting him up briefly. He's a veteran operational officer. So he's not like a kind of securicrat or a staffer. He's been a spy. Also, a deep Atlantisist. He'd done some schooling in the US. He'd been head of station in Washington.

Special relationship is important to him like Blair. 1999. He's head of the Secret Service, so he's C, Chief of MI6, which is also important because, you know, I think maybe like the CIA, they hadn't had the easiest decade in the 90s. There's a bit of insecurity, isn't there, in the spy world, in that post-cold war period. The CIA in the 90s lost just about 25% of its workforce. They just stopped hiring. And so, you know, a bunch of people that tritted out. And then roughly a similar amount of budget. Yeah. So you had security services that I think were casting around

for a new raison d'etre after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yeah. I mean, the famous joke, wasn't it? When a plane crashed into the – like a small plane near the White House, the joke was that it was the CIA director, James Walsy, trying to get a meeting with President Clinton. Because he was so he couldn't – it was the only way he could try and get to see him.

And I think there was a bit where, like – I think that is part of our story that the intelligence agencies in the 90s had struggled to make themselves appear relevant to their customers. the prime minister and the president. And now suddenly after 9-11, they're important. And Blair and Bush are close, aren't they? And speak regularly in this period. There's a phone call between the two on December the 3rd of 2001, in which Blair says

that he's open to regime change in Iraq, but that it would require, quote, an extremely clever plan. That sounds about right. It will have to be clever to get rid of Saddam, the novelist. To justify it. Yeah. And Blair is saying, if we're going to do it, we need to build support domestically and internationally. And interesting, on that call, he says to Bush, Richard Dear Love, head of MI6 is coming over.

Two days later, Dear Love is in the White House for talks with Bush's top team. And Dear Love is kind of acting, even though he's MI6 chief, as almost a kind of back channel envoy from the Prime Minister to Washington, communicating, but also. I think reporting back to London, here's what's really going on in Washington. Here's what the White House are thinking. And Dear Love said to me years later, he said, I was probably the first to say to the Prime Minister, whether you like it or not, get your ducks in a row because it looks like as though they're building up to an invasion.

Keep close if you want any influence. You can see the direction of travel. And it's interesting because, you know, Deer Love cultivates his relationship with CIA officers, including George Tenet. It's an interesting case study in how the intelligence relationship becomes a conduit to influence policy on both sides of the Atlantic. And I think it's not something that either intelligence agency would say out loud or directly,

but I think both countries see that relationship because it's so intimate and there's so much shared trust between the two sides that it's actually a really effective way. If you get the personalities right, then there's connection between, you know, the chief or I mean, it goes way down to pretty, you know, mid-levels of the organizations where you can have really close relationships. If you get that right, it's a way to influence how the other side thinks about the world and the kind of the choices that they make. Yeah. And I think it was a joke in Washington, which is Tenet was Dear Love's best recruitment, one CIA, as I said. So the UK is trying to work out what's going on.

At one point, they think a big meeting in the summer is cancelled because the Americans are so busy and the Brits are like, no, no, no, we really want to come. out. So they agree that a kind of quick meeting takes place, you know, if it's in Washington over the weekend, Dear Love travels over in July. Dear Love approaches Tenet and asks to speak offline, and they talk for close to two hours, the two intelligence chief. Now, this is according to Tenet's memoir, George Tenet's memoir, Dear Love comes away with a clear perception that the US administration was determined to transform the Middle East, starting with Iraq. Yeah. Tenet says that Dear Love spoke to Cheney's team and believed that the crowd round the vice president was playing fast and loose with the evidence. So that is Tenet's recollection of what

Deer Love is. Dear Love comes back straight from that meeting to Downing Street because there's a big meeting of Britain's top national security team, July 23rd. Very interesting. Because it's a very secret meeting. But we know about it because what's called the Downing Street memo is later leaked, which is a draft memo of this meeting. So we have this really fascinating moment where you can see what's going on in London. And the meeting starts with the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee laying out

the state of Saddam's regime. Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee also a character in our story, John Scarlett, former MI6 officer, later to be MI6 chief. Scarlett, this meeting says Saddam's regime is tough based on fear, doesn't mention he's mainly right.

writing novels, says the only way of overthrowing it would be through massive military action. Dear Love stands up next and reports back on his trip in Washington. Now, in the draft minutes of the meeting, he's quoted as saying that there had been a perceptible shift in attitude, military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. Very interesting statement, which I should say, dear love, will later dispute that that's what he meant, and he will have those minutes correct it.

But that's what goes in the draft minutes. And in any case, I don't think it's accurate, as we'll see later. In any case, the Brits, I think it's fair to say, Gordon, dislike the idea of a massive war being fought by the Americans without being involved. at this point in time. Yeah. Again, contrast to today. Contrast to today. And the chief of the defense staff tells Blair later that there would be a real problem

with this army if they were not properly involved in the American War. Then the military did not like the idea that the US could do a big land invasion and us not being alongside them. It's kind of like, that is what we are there for, and that's what we do. We plug in alongside them. So it's interesting. The military, and this is often overlooked, we're really keen on not having the Americans do this alone. The most kind of cautious voice was the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, who says the case was thin against Saddam. He says Saddam's WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea, or Iran. It's really interesting, isn't it? I mean, he's right. He's right to the evidence. But the problem is that those are not the countries that the U.S. have decided to go for first. Which is so fascinating because in 2000, this is 2002, so I mean, essentially concurrently with this, this is the first glimmers that the world has gotten of the enrichment facility

at Natanz in Iran. Yeah. And obviously, the US no friend of Iran at this time. So it does beg this interesting question of why not focus on Iran because where you actually have very recent hard evidence of... Of a secret centrifuge plant has just been rid of. A secret centrifuge plan. Which you don't have with Iraq.

But this exactly goes, I think, to the key point, which is the reasons were not fundamentally WMD. Because the reasons were they want to get rid of Saddam for all the other reasons. Grudges, history, they think it's maybe a bit easier than, you know, Iran. And so they picked Iraq as the place. And then they've decided on WMD as the justification for it. And it is interesting because even in this meeting, you sense. you know, in Downing Street, the UK needs that legal rationale of why to be involved in regime change. And the advantage with Iraq is you can use non-compliance with the UN resolutions

from the 1990s as a rationale for war. And this is why the Brits are also quite keen on pushing the argument. Let's make this about regime change. regime change in itself is not a legal or a, you know, political justification for the war, which works for the UK, whereas saying that Iraq is in defiance of UN resolutions is something you can build a case around legally, internationally and domestically. While there are voices in the UK and some in the US, you say, we can make a moral case for getting rid of Saddam. We should focus on the moral case, which is he's a murderous tyrant who's used chemical weapons against his own people in Halabja. That doesn't get you over the line in terms of making a case. Again, for the UK, WMD is the most useful justification. Let's assume we're

taking part, but there's a lot more work that needs to be done. And let's focus on this as the reason it's interesting, the cabinet secretary at the time, is surprised at how forward-leaning Blair is and says there's a gleam in his eye, which worries me. And five days after the Downing Street meeting, presumably with that mad gleam still in his eye, Tony Blair sends a personal note to Bush, never designed to be public. And in fact, the UK government will fight for years to stop it being made public. But it gives, I think, a really full sense of his thinking and his strategy. And actually shows, Blair shows the note to some of his closest advisors who tell him the language is too open-ended and he should change it. But I guess like all good writers, when

someone tells you to edit something down, you just ignore it. You know, like Dobb would have done with this copy editor who dared touch his novels. And so Blair doesn't change any of the language. And he pens this note. The opening line is quite famous now. It says from Tony Blair, I will be with you, whatever. I mean, it's so interesting. That's the opening line of this note. Now, Blair, we should say, is quite defensive about this note. I've interviewed Tony Blair, and I've asked him specifically about that language and talked to her about it. And he is quite defensive about it. He says people are over-interpreting it. You have to see it in the context of this being a personal note about the personal relationship. And he says,

look at the rest of the note, because the rest of the note, and he's right about this, is all the things that need to be done. You know, it goes, here are all the difficulties. We need planning. This isn't going to be as easy as Kosovo. It's not going to be as easy as Afghanistan. You know, it's the right thing to do, but we need to do this. We need to do that. Here are all the, basically, he's saying, I'll be with you whatever, but here are all the potential problems in regime change, including post-war planning, that we need to think about if we're going to do it. And so Blair is kind of making the case that, you know, we need a coalition, we need to go through the United Nations, we need deadlines, we need inspectors. But he is fundamentally saying,

I'll be with you whatever. Well, he's not linking UK support for the war to Bush taking seriously are taking steps on any of the other things he's listing out, right? He's saying, we will be with you. Here's some things you need to think about. Not we will be with you if you do these things. Yeah. Was there a world where the UK wouldn't have gone with the US into a rock at this time? Like, is that an actual counterfactual or? It is. And there are historical parallels, for instance, when, you know, Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the 60s, decided not to go into Vietnam with the Americans, despite massive pressure. And today, Kirstama, despite pressure, did not, you know, even let UK bases be used for

offensive operations in Iran. But I guess you're back here to this post-9-11 era. Yeah, it's 2002. It's a very different time. And America has been hit. Blair is at the peak of his powers and thinks he's got influence. And his strategy is, you know, I. can influence the US, they're going to do this anyway. I can influence them onto a better path.

He is making the case that we need to go through an international process. And it's interesting in this note, he also says, we need to make the case. If we recapitulate all the WMD evidence, add his attempts to secure nuclear capability, and as seems possible, add on an al-Qaeda link, I think it will be hugely persuasive over here. Plus, of course, the abhorred nature of the regime. It's relevant because there's actually a big debate going on in Washington over the summer about how to go about regime change. Yeah, this is the summer of 2002, and there are a lot of different voices in the administration who have different views on Iraq and why it should be done and even how it should be done. I mean, you have hawks like Cheney who absolutely do not want to go down the UN route. They don't see a need for it.

The U.S. can just act unilaterally, and let's get on with the war. Secretary of State Colin Powell wants to go down the UN route. He and the UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw are meeting and working together to try and persuade their leadership to go through the UN. So we have this jockeying over how the case for war is made that's continuing throughout the summer of 2002. Yeah. And Blair is going out to meet Bush in Camp David in early September for a final decision about how the plan is going to unfold. And it's interesting, Alistair Campbell, Tony Blair's Director of Communications at the time, keeps a diary. September 1st, 2002, he writes,

obviously the best thing to do would be to avoid war, get the UN inspectors in and the weapons out, but it was obvious that the US had to be managed into a better position. So it's interesting. You get a sense there that they're trying to manage the US. So it's that thing about Blair, it's about influence. So Blair goes out to see President Bush. at Camp David early September. Lots of people think Blair has already committed to war earlier in the year. But I think this is the real moment because President Bush looks Tony Blair in the eye. They have a talk.

Bush says we have to deal with Saddam. Bush recalls he was probing and pushing Blair, making clear this process may well end up in war. And Blair says, I'm with you, looking him in the eye. And it's, but Bush then sees Alastair Campbell, who, as I said, we have on a bonus episode afterwards. And President Bush says to Alistair Campbell, your man has got Cojones. Have I said that right? You've largely pronounced it correctly. That's right.

And we should say what those are. Balls in Spanish. Or in Texan. In Texan rancher, in Texan rancher, it also translates as balls. And Bush will call it the Gahones meeting afterward. And Bush has also agreed, though, to go to the UN, and in so doing has helped make it easier for Tony Blair to back him. Yeah.

So this is effectively what they've agreed. Blair has said, I'm with you, and Bush has agreed, okay, I will go through the UN to get new inspections on Iraq and to get a new resolution putting pressure on Saddam. And that's the agreement they've come to, which for Tony Blair, for those around him, this is an example of UK influence because Cheney did not want this. The vice president was just like, we don't need to get bogged down in inspections in the UN. We just need to get on with this war and show American power. And if the Brits are with us fine and if they're not, you know, whatever.

But Blair, along with Colin Powell as a kind of ally, I think has succeeded in this policy. of going through the United Nations, getting inspections, but also part of the plan is to make the public case now for regime change. And there's this fascinating comment from Andrew Card, who was the White House Chief of Staff. And in September, he does a New York Times interview, and he talks about how that month, so September 2002, just after this meeting between Bush and Blair, they're going to start making the case to the public and also Congress, remember when Congress mattered. And he says, from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.

In other words, they decided you're not, you don't start the case in August. In September, we come back from a marketing point of view, that's when you introduce your new product. And the product, of course, here is a war. The marketing strategy is going to be to use the justification of WMD and the means by which that marketing strategy is going to be sold is the intelligence picture. And that is going to be a place where things go very badly wrong. That's right.

So let's stop there and we'll start looking really in detail about how crazily the intelligence goes wrong. some of those specific claims about 45 minutes about nuclear weapons, about exiles in the next episodes. And a reminder, of course, you can hear those straight away. If you're a declassified club member, join at the rest is classified.com. And people will get access to these really interesting interviews for club members with people who were in the room. So we're going to be asking Alistair Campbell about his cohones or about Tony Blair's cohenes, I guess. I don't know.

I don't know whether he's going to answer, but we could ask him as well as to Richard Deerlove. We can ask whatever we want. It's our show. I don't think we can ask whatever we want. Are you going to ask Richard Deerlob and Mike Morel of the CIA about their cohesion? I think not. But they've got a lot to say because they were in the room as well where it happened. So do sign up to hear those interviews.

That's right. And also a reminder, we have live shows coming up on the 4th and 5th of September in London. Do get your tickets for that. also at the rest is classified.com, and we will see you next time. See you next time.