The Rest Is Classified - 158. The Road to Iraq:  George Bush's Unstoppable War (Ep 6)

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

Was Iraq WMD one of history’s biggest intelligence failures? Why couldn’t Saddam Hussein prove he has destroyed his weapons of mass destruction? And what is the legacy of the Iraq War in the Middle East? Listen as David and Gordon conclude their investigation into Iraq WMD and analyse what has been learnt from the decision to go to war with Iraq. ------------------- 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. ------------------- 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. Inspectors are on the ground hunting for rocks weapons of mass destruction using tip-offs from MI6 and CIA. But will they find anything to support the drive for war? Well, welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm David McCloskey.

And I'm Gordon Carrera. This is the final episode of this six-part series where we are going to find the WMD. The WMD have just sort of befuddled commentators, intelligence analysts, politicians for a generation. We are going to reveal all. At the end of this episode, importantly, you have to stay for the entire episode. We're not going to tell you right now, but we're going to get there. But yes, we've got to nearly the end of this story. We've been looking at how the UK and US have built this case of WMD as the justification for war,

using some, it's fair to say, dodgy, if that's not too British a term, intelligence like Kerbball. But the question is, will the international inspectors be able to uncover the truth? I had forgotten this part of the story that there actually were inspectors who got into Iraq just before the war. We had talked in an earlier episode about how Tony Blair and Colin Powell and others had eventually persuaded George W. Bush to go down what was called the UN route. And harder line advisors like Dick Cheney had not wanted to bother with this, but probably in part to get the Brits to go along with this, George W. Bush decides to go to the UN. And on November the 8th of 2002, the UN adopts Resolution 1441 to send inspectors back into Iraq.

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You can draw in international support. You can build that case. And of course, if he does let them in, which he's going to do, they're going to find the. the weapons and they're going to disarm him or they're going to find that he's hiding stuff and then that will help justify the war. So they think they trapped Saddam with this resolution. But as we'll see, I think the US and particularly the UK are the ones who are going to be trapped. So the idea is Saddam has to cooperate with these inspectors. You know, it's a kind of test for him to show whether he's going to be able to cooperate,

but the expectation is that he'll fail and then that will build support. The hawks in Washington, as you said, Dick Cheney and the like, see these inspections as a mistake. You know, they can divert the US away from the war they just want to get on with. And the idea is that then when Saddam frustrates the inspectors or they find something, then they'll potentially be a new UN resolution authorising action against Saddam, which everyone can get behind and everything's going to be fine. That's the idea. Spoiler alert.

It's not going to work out that way. also a little unclear what mechanism would lead the UN to authorize action after something is found or if Saddam is not compliant with the inspectors? Because is it enough to just say that Iraq is in breach of the existing resolution? Or do you then need to pass another resolution that that authorizes military action against Saddam because he's in contravention of Resolution 1441. Yeah. And I suppose here the premise is that if you can show Saddam that you're credibly threatening war,

maybe it's moot and he comes clean about the WMD that he obviously has. But what if he doesn't have it, Gordon? How do you come clean? It's hard. How do you come clean to something you don't have? And so I think it's worth going back to Saddam. isn't it? Because I think that's what's so interesting is Saddam as a character in this story. Because as we get to the end of 2002, Saddam is going to decide, well, I'm going to let the

inspectors back in. He's been told by France and Russia that that's what he should do. And he kind of listens to them. And then again, we get one of these meetings. I love these meetings of Saddam's Revolutionary Command Council, you know, where he gathers all his top aides. And this one, this one is a quaker because this one, he gathers his top aides and he says, guys, there is no WMD. Oh, no. What? What?

Why have we, why have we been doing, why we've been suffering for almost 15 years under sanctions when we didn't have WMD? Yeah. And it sounds like some of his generals are actually stunned by this because they've always thought, well, he's, you know, I don't know about the WMD, but someone else, you know, he's definitely got some hidden somewhere. And so it's this kind of. weird thing where he's now telling his generals like, yeah, we got nothing. And he says, you know,

if anyone's got anything and he little bits of leftover stuff, destroy it, give it up, we don't want them to find something themselves. And he says, like, right, we've got to declare everything. And so they're going to do this declaration, which is going to come in December, which is part of the UN resolution. Jafar, this nuclear scientist who I met, is one of the people working on this declaration. And he is trying to own up to everything. And they're going to send it. And they're going to send it to the UN. And of course, London, Washington go, well, there's nothing new in this. They're not admitting to anything.

Yeah. Yeah, they're not admitting to anything. And it's so funny because Jafar is kind of tearing his hair out. Because he's like, we keep trying to tell people. And he's actually been to New York, Jafar, in April 2002, to meet Hans Blix, Mohammed al-Baradai. And he, you know, he has to be calmed down by the other AIDS because he's so angry that they won't believe him when he's saying we've got nothing. Although I also think part of the

reason Jafar is so angry is that he's getting pitched at every stage along the way by CIA officers on the plane out of, you know, out of the Middle East heading towards New York. An American comes and sits next to him in the seat and is like, Mr. Jafar, would you like to tell us about the WMD? And he's like, no, I'm going to the UN to tell them we don't have anything. And then at the airport he gets detained and he gets, you know, question again. He gets pitched to this hotel by the CIA. He's constantly like, no, I just want to say we don't have any WMD. Which, of course, is what you would say if you're hiding it. Exactly. Exactly. That's the point. They're like, well, these guys have been hiding stuff for years, so, you know, they're just making it up.

So there's this interesting bit where the Iraqis are trying to own up to everything. And the inspectors now arrive, and they're going to start kind of going around Saddam's palaces, you know, looking for stuff under Hans Blix and Mohammed al-Baradai. And of course, they're not going to be finding anything. They're looking for what are called the unaccounted-for materials, which is material. That's unaccounted for. Yeah, it's unaccountable. Where, you know, they'd made so much anthrax, well, where is it? And Jafar is like, well, the records were rubbish, and we've destroyed the stuff, and we didn't record destroying it. So what can we do about it?

And, I mean, one small story I was told by an inspector. He said that an Iraqi scientist later revealed what had happened to some of the anthrable. So this pretty nasty stuff. When they destroyed it, they just poured it into the ground, but they've done it near one of Saddam's palaces. And so they then fear that if they have to own up to having poured it into the ground near one of Saddam's palaces at any point, if they own up about that, Saddam will be so angry, they'll kill him. That's bad form. They should have gone out. They should have gone elsewhere to dump the anthrax.

It's a pretty stupid thing dumping it near one of your bosses' palaces. So, you know, that's a small example where they're like, we can't prove and we don't even want to come clean about where we dump the anthrax because it's too dangerous. And Saddam is often said to be bluffing about having these weapons to intimidate regional opponents, the Iranians, the Israelis, George Tenet is the CIA director, wrote in his memoirs. Before the war, we didn't understand that Saddam was bluffing and he did not understand that we were not. but I think this is a fascinating twist here, which is that as we're getting closer to war, Saddam stops bluffing. He now just starts to tell the U.S. and the UK that he doesn't have weapons,

and yet he cannot prove the negative. How can he prove that he doesn't have something that he doesn't have and that he's actually not hiding anything? So any evidence that Saddam doesn't have weapons is being treated as deception, while all of the weird, sketchy, fragmentary circumstantial reporting that we've been discussing is being treated as absolutely earth-shattering

and massively serious and important to the overall case. And this, to me, is a great snapshot of the mindset and analytic problems in a nutshell and how you had confirmation bias just carrying and group think, carrying huge numbers of people, even at a point where Saddam himself is coming clean. He's done bluffing by early 2003 and no one's listening. That's right. And so one of the ways Saddam is trying to say, I haven't got this stuff. So he's done the declaration to the UN is he's also got these back channels. So there's a really interesting

one, which MI6 have with the Iraqis. So early 2003, the MI6 controller for the Middle East, goes to the Middle East and meets a senior Iraqi intelligence official. This is a kind of secret meeting. I mean, it's a back channel rather than an agent meeting, and they're going to meet a number of times as war approaches. The CIA is aware of these contacts, and it's kind of being briefed about them. And the Iraqi intelligence officer tells the MI6 guy, we don't have any weapons.

Now, some people later write this up as like a lost opportunity to avoid war and more evidence that the kind of spies were lying. because they'd been told there were no weapons and yet they still press on with war. But I think this misunderstands it because the Iraqi is saying in private, exactly what Saddam is saying in public, which is we don't have the stuff. And everyone goes, well, they're just saying what we expect them to say. Of course they're saying they don't have the stuff. But we know that they've got it.

That's the problem all along. There's nothing that Saddam can say or do at this point, which is going to convince people that he doesn't have something that they think he has. again, the analytic problem is that the bar for intelligence that suggests there are no weapons is much higher than evidence of their existence. And those two hypotheses are not being given equal weight and subjected to the same rigorous examination of what do the facts say. And the inspectors who are on the ground, they're not finding anything.

They're spending a lot of time in chicken farms, which, which are just chicken farms, unfortunately. Yeah, they're not hiding secret documents. And this is also, I think, interesting, because having covered it at the time, I've spoken to a lot of these inspectors since. It was becoming clear to them there was nothing there because they were going to all of these places that British and American intelligence said were potential weapon sites, where the intelligence had suggested there might be mobile labs or something else,

and they were finding nothing. And so they can see this is falling apart. But that's not really being made public. The public don't know that. That actually, this carefully constructed case is already falling apart. I mean, one inspector talks about turning up at one site. It's supposed to be a mobile biological lab. And it's basically an ice cream van covered in cobwebs.

You know, I mean, this is the scale of it. And the places where Curveball was saying, these are where they're developing this stuff, it just doesn't fit. Hans Blix is going back to the UK saying, Thanks for all this intelligence, but, you know, it doesn't work. And then Tony Blair is going to his spooks. Well, Hans Blix is saying this stuff isn't good. Where is the good stuff?

Where is the intelligence? You told me that existed about WMD. And he's pushing MI6 hard. There's a really interesting meeting. January the 9th, 2003. Tony Blair meets Richard Dearloaf, Chief of MI6, who of course is going to be in an episode for our club members, a bonus episode. and Tony Blair asks about the chances of finding a silver bullet, something to prove Saddam has the weapons,

which will help turn international opinion and support for the war that's clearly coming. And Dear Love is kind of saying, well, we're still looking for something. And Blair looks at him and says, Richard, my fate is in your hands. I mean, that is quite a statement from a prime minister to an intelligence chief, isn't it? I mean, it's because he knows that he's put his faith, trust, his fate, his future in the hands of the intelligence, which he has been told, assured, is there. It's not the same on the other side of the Atlantic, though, is it? Because Bush, I mean, Bush has made, and Bush's advisors have made the case for WMD based on intelligence. But I think it's fair to say that Bush doesn't care as much about finding.

something because there's a lot of different reasons for the war in Iraq among Bush's advisors. And I think WMD is not, frankly, one of the most important. I think it's the lowest common denominator. What is Paul Wolfowitz said they could all agree on? But I think inside his administration, George W. Bush isn't as reliant on the W.M.D. line to make the case for war. I think that's right. It matters less than it does.

does for Blair, who has really staked everything on that WMD. And so the inspector's drawing a blank. MI6 is saying, well, it just shows how devious sonam is and how incompetent the inspectors are. So they start kind of saying, you know, these inspectors are terrible. They don't, you know, they're announcing where they're going. And it is worth saying that D. Love continues to blame the inspectors and believe things were there. So, I mean, we'll be hearing from him directly. but he still thinks that there was material which ends up getting hidden and, he will say, moved out of the country by Saddam's regime.

I fair to say, that's not a universally accepted view within the intelligence community. Is this the light about moving it to Syria? Yeah, I think we should come to that. I'll go out on the limb here and say, after having worked on the Syria account for many years, I don't agree with that statement. There's no evidence in any of the intelligence I've ever seen to suggest that that ever happened. Because I think what it's based on is as the war approaches, they see some trucks moving over the border into Syria from Iraq. But that doesn't mean the trucks had WMD because I think the idea is people are moving other stuff. If you're a senior Iraqi official, you're probably moving your money and your possessions out over the border, aren't you?

So I think there is a suspicion about that and even some reporting. But the two regimes hated each other too. There's also that the Syrian and Iraqi regimes were in conflict and competition. Anyhow. Yeah. So, you know, there's all this tension, you know, the UK's got a source inside Saddam's special security organization talking about how they're going to stymie the inspectors and keep them away from things.

But that's actually standard behavior because as we know, the special security organization thinks the inspectors, the spies, you know, gathering intelligence for war, and they're trying to protect Saddam. So that's the problem. So by the time you get to the end of January, Tony Blair is in real trouble because he'd been hoping that either there might be a coup to topple Saddam. Sounds familiar from recent events in Iran, doesn't it? Always easy. Just count on the coup. Let's roll the dice on a coup. I've got a good feeling. We'll just poke a little bit and there will be a coup. So he hasn't got this coup.

No, he hasn't got his coup. Or he thinks maybe Saddam will just give up all his weapons. And therefore we might not need a war, you know, because Saddam will just decide to disarm, which of course, as we know, he can't do because he hasn't got them. And then Blair is thinking, well, the other option is, you know, the UN is going to find stuff. And that will help me justify the war that's coming. Or he's going to block the inspectors. And that will help me justify the war. And it's not happening.

And the inspectors are saying, well, we need a few more months to come. to the answers, Blix and Washington are starting to clash. I mean, Blix thinks, and I think rightly, that Washington is bugging him. So he starts meeting his team in a restaurant because he doesn't want to be spied on by Washington. And Cheney himself, I think, and Cheney's team are saying, if you don't find stuff, if you're not aggressive enough to Blix and El Baraday, we will discredit you. So I think there's a kind of growing tension here over why nothing's been found. But Blix also believes there are weapons. Does it? Yeah, he does at the time.

And I think it's one of the interesting points is that I think he probably, he thought there was probably something there. He's also a bit confused as why they haven't found stuff. But they think, well, we need months. We need time. And this is the problem because Blair wants more time. The inspectors want more time. Washington, the military time table is now dictating events. And they do not want more time.

So Blair goes to Washington on January 31st to make the case. to Bush at a kind of face-to-face meeting to let this UN process play out, maybe six months. What he gets from Bush at that meeting is just a few weeks delay, because President Bush is making it clear to him privately that the war is going to happen in March. And Tony Blair says, well, I think we need a second resolution from the UN to authorise war at the press conference after their meeting. President Bush says, well, the second resolution would be welcome, but that's not the same as saying, I really want one and I'm going to work for it. Effectively, the US is saying, we're giving up on inspections. We don't think they're going to work, wedding for war.

And this is a very memorable scene for me because I was a producer at the Today program, Radio 4 at the time. And I flew out with our presenter, James Nocatee, and we had an exclusive interview for the Today program with Tony Blair as he came out of that meeting with President Bush at Andrews Air Force. Space. And we were told to go to Andrew's Air Force Base and wait for Blair, where he was going to get his plane back to London. So before we got on the plane, he was going to do an interview four of us in this tiny room in Andrews Air Force Base, me and James Nocatee from the BBC, me holding the microphone, and Tony Blair and one, Alistair Campbell, podcaster. Podcaster. Pre-podcast career. The four of us in the room, in this tiny room. And what I remember is that Blair looked uneasy and uncomfortable and you could sense he was really unhappy.

And as soon as the mic went on and the question started to be asked, he was in Blair mode and he was, you know, kind of brilliant performer as he always was. But I could sense it. And then years later, or 20 years later, I interviewed him for a series about Iraq. And I asked him, did he feel trapped at that moment? And he says, you're right. I was uncomfortable because I could feel all the options were closing. This is a guy who's not necessarily thought, I want to go to war, but has made a commitment to Bush that he will go to war with him if the process is followed, particularly going through the UN, and now suddenly that's falling apart. Is the UK public at the time on board with the war? Is there a desire to do it? I think it is split, basically,

whereas the US public is broadly supportive because you're in that post-9-11 world. Yeah. In the UK it was, of course, everyone now says I was against the war, but it was broadly split down the middle. If you look at the politics of it, but for the UK, getting a second resolution from the UN was really important because they want to get that second resolution to authorise military action because then it is legal and through the UN and politically for Tony Blair at home, within his government, within his party and the Labor Party, that was really, really important. And they're going to struggle to get that. And so at this point, we also get a fairly sensational front page of the Observer, which

appears on March 2nd of the UK with the great headline, revealed US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war. And this is fascinating because it's based on a top secret email. which is sent from NSA, the U.S. Sicken Agency to GCHQ, that is requesting British help with a surge to intercept communications of the six swing states at the UN who are going to vote on this resolution, on the second resolution that will authorize military force. And the email has been leaked by a GCHQ employee who ends up being arrested a few days later and eventually she won't be prosecuted.

But this is kind of a fascinating little insight of maybe some of the unease with the war that was bubbling up inside the British national security bureaucracy. That's right. I think it is a fascinating moment. There were a few people in MI6 who asked to be moved, I think, because they're distaste for the war, but didn't speak out publicly. But Catherine Gunn goes public when she sees this email saying, we're going to spy on the UN. and is opposed to the war and goes public with it.

As you said, the prosecution against her is eventually dropped. There's a film official secrets about this. It's a fascinating story about her. I think it's interesting, though, because are we shocked by the idea that the US and UK were spying on the United Nations? Right. Are we? I don't know. Are we?

I'm less shocked. We're not shocked by anything anymore, Gordon. we've been doing this too long. We're not shocked by anything. It makes me think of the series we did on the Snowden Revelations, where there was shock, shock that we were spying on the Germans, for example. And this does not surprise me in the least. And in fact, I would hope, I think Catherine Gunn is probably leaking in this because she

opposes the war, not necessarily that she is opposed to spying on the U.S., but any citizen of the U.S. or U.K. in this circumstance, I think should be comfortable, I know that many won't be, with the idea that you'd want your government to have an information advantage about what's going on at the U.N. And so you should spy on the other governments, the other U.S. admissions that are voting on an important resolution that affects U.S. or U.K. national security policy. It seems obvious to me. What am I missing, Gordon? I think you're right in that it's the kind of thing that they do, which we don't always know about, but it is that thing which is if you really oppose the policy and a part of it, I think your best option is to resign. Now, leaking, go public, that's a, you know, obviously different thing. But I think it's interesting because it does give a sense, though, about how divisive this was at the time,

including even within an intelligence agency like GCHQ, that someone felt that they were outraged by this and had to But it's not going to stop the march till for war. You're getting these reports from the UN inspectors, including one from Alvaraday, saying the uranium from Africa claims are fake. But in a way, it doesn't matter anymore because the trains leaving the station for war. The effort to get a second resolution fails because the French say they won't support it. Blair, meanwhile, is facing this vote in Parliament on March the 18th. This is another big moment for him because the US has woken up to the idea.

idea. Congress has already authorized war back in October, but this is Blair's boat, and it's coming on the eve of war. And there's worry he might have to resign. And he has a call with President Bush just before the vote, in which Bush says, I want regime change in Baghdad, not London. This is supposed to be getting rid of Saddam, not Tony Blair, because he's worried that Blair will lose this vote in Parliament and have to resign. And he actually makes a really interesting offer, which is he says, you don't have to take part in the war. You do not have to take part in the invasion. You can just do the reconstruction afterwards. I understand you're in a difficult position, but you can back out at this stage. And I asked Blair about this years later. And he confirmed

it to me for the first time publicly and said he had no regrets about turning that down. He said, they were offering me the way out because they felt sorry for the politically difficult situation that I was in. But don't be under any doubt at all. If Britain had left the alliance at that point, it would have had a significant impact on the relationship. I was sure that our alliance depended on us doing this together. That's what Tony Blair told me, years later, about why he turned down that offer from George W. Bush to back out at the last minute. What do you think about that statement? I think it's a very revealing statement because it tells you that Tony Blair's reasons for taking part in the war were about preserving the relationship

with the US. I've always felt that was the primary motivation for him. He does worry about WMD. I'm not saying that's not part of it and getting into the hands, terrorist, or reshaping the Middle East. These ideological reasons matter. But I think he is fundamentally thinking we need to stay close. Blair wins the vote. Yeah, he does. He makes it through. And, And the war, as we creep into March of 2003, is about to begin. But it is going to start early thanks to one final piece of intelligence. So maybe let's take a break there. When we come back, we will see what this intelligence kicker is that gets the war going. So welcome back. It's March 2003. And I guess a bit like the recent attack on Iran that we saw in 26. The

The attack on Iraq in 2003 starts with a what's called a decapitation strike based on inside intelligence against the leader, in this case, of the Iraqi regime. On March 18th of 2003, the CIA has got some agents on the ground of Iraq, cryptidym DB rock stars. Good name. Which is a great, great krypton. These agents are linked with the security detail for one of Saddam's sons, a second source is monitoring Saddam's special security organizations communications, and the bodyguards agency

understands shut off telecommunications infrastructure when Saddam is going to be in a particular area. And these sources suggest that Saddam will be at a place called Dora Farms, which is a compound outside of Baghdad, be there a bit after midnight local time. The satellite imagery reveals lots of vehicles, which could suggest there's a meeting. And Luis Ruay, who's the head of the Iraq operations group at CIA, who literally races over to the White House, he's trying to get dressed, he's putting a tie on as he does,

so he wants to brief this information to the National Security Council. So it's about 6 p.m. Washington time. He actually goes in, Luis Rada briefs Bush with a map in the Oval Office, and this little piece of intelligence is going to give the U.S. a reason to actually start the war early, because Bush had given a 48-hour deadline on March the 17th for Saddam to give up power. Feels like that was never quite in the cards.

But that deadline is not yet over. But this is too good of an opportunity. And so Bush gives the order at 7 p.m. Eastern time to hit the spot to American F-117th, stealth fighters carrying 2,000-pound precision-guided bombs, lift off from an airbase in Cutter. The bombs land, but I think it's really only fitting for this story about Iraqi intelligence debacles that Saddam is not there. So the intelligence does not pan out. And I think actually one of the sources that they had is killed in the bombing that the CIA had. Oh, boy.

So it's a interesting start to the war. What is Saddam doing, though? It's so interesting because until close to the end, I think Saddam, is not convinced the US are actually going to do it. He thinks that they're bluffing. As we'd said, he's not prepared very much because he's been spending more and more time in his last few years, not running the Iraqi government, but really focusing on his new career path as what else, but a novelist. I mean, if only it was a few years later, he could have had a podcast as well, but at this point, it's just, it's just, you know, the novelist path that he's going down.

If Saddam were still around today, he would have a, he'd have a terrific podcast. He'd have big podcast. But he's writing his latest novel, isn't he? He's on his fourth novel in the run-up to the war. What of my regrets about this series, Gordon, that I'm already happening, even though we're not done with it, is that we haven't done more on Saddam's novels and Saddam's sort of life in the written word, which he had focused on. The Goldhanger have a book club, you know. That's true. We could suggest Zabiba and the king could be the next selection. But that March, you might think that Saddam was, you know, pulling all the strings in Iraq and sort of avidly preparing for war. But in fact, what he is doing is trying desperately to complete his fourth novel, which was titled, Get Out, Damned One, exclamation point. A work of a work of allegory and propaganda that was focused on rallying the nation of Iraq into an insurgency against the American occupying. and as he has as he's preparing to go underground, Saddam is is doing what no novelist should do

and rushing, rushing the production. You never do that. Of get out, damned one. He wants to get that to the presses immediately before the, before the invasion deadline. So I guess I guess what's happened here, just so we're clear about this, is that instead of doing things that he might have conceivably done to avert the invasion. He has been rushing his fourth novel to print to prepare the nation for an insurgency. And I guess in one sense, it's logical because Saddam has tried to tell the Americans and the Brits over and over again that he doesn't have the

weapons. And inspectors have been crawling around not finding weapons. And so he must have decided somewhere along the way that all he could do was, you know, be a man of the pen. That's all. And And they do manage to print 40,000 copies before the war starts. Pretty good print run. Not bad. That's a good first print run. Yeah. So that's Saddam on the eve of the war.

It's interesting. I was in Iraq in February 2003, so just a few weeks before, but in the northern bit of Iraq, the Kurdish bit of Iraq. And that is my memory of it. I was not penning novels. I was reporting for the today program from the Kurdish part. But I have one very vivid memory, which is I was kind of working alongside the P.U.K. who were one of the Jalal Talabani, who was one of the kind of Kurdish leaders at the time.

And we were going to a meeting of all the Iraqi exiles at a place called Saladin in this kind of autonomous bit of Iraq, outside of Iraqi control. I'll never forget it because we were driving in a convoy, and I was part of his convoy, and we hit this kind of mountaintop, and another convoy came towards us. And out of this other convoy, it stopped, both convoy stopped, came Ahmed Chalabi. And Chalabi came out, and Chalabee and Talibani, I remember seeing them embrace. And it was two guys who knew we've got the Americans to do what we've been wanting to do for years, which is get rid of Saddam. There was this moment, this feel amongst the exiles, you know, as they gathered for this conference at Saladin that it was coming at last.

And, you know, for lots of those people, the anticipation was enormous because they hated Stan. He'd been their enemy, been this ruthless tyrant despite his novelistic career. And he was finally going to be gone. And this was it. And so, yeah, it's a very vivid recollection to me. But actually, when the war started, I was then in Washington covering things. Lewis Ruehda, who we talked about, head of the CIA Iraq operations group, he describes taking a Black Hawk over Kuwait just before it starts.

And you can just see all this American armor, you know, tanks and helicopters and gun ships everywhere. And then watching on a screen as the trackers for all these vehicles suddenly move over into Iraq as the invasion starts. And of course, the invasion itself goes beautifully. The ground invasion goes amazingly well and amazingly quickly with a thunder run into Baghdad. A few people do wonder why did Saddam not use any of his special weapons as the troops approach Baghdad? But they take Baghdad incredibly quickly.

So far, so good. And Saddam, of course, goes off on the run and goes into hiding. but through one of his former bodyguards, the Americans get to tip off. And on the evening of December 13th, 2003, U.S. Special Forces find him hiding in a spider hole in the ground near a farmhouse into Crete. It was actually very close to where he'd been born.

And it's the same farm that he had hidden on in 1959 after that failed assassination attempt that we talked about all the way back in episode one, which is remarkable. wild, isn't it? And the pictures of it are astounding because he emerges from this hole. I mean, he looks terrible. He's got, you know, his hair is a mess. He's got this long, straggly beard. He looks like a man who's been hiding in a spider hole for six months. And he comes out and he says, I am Saddam Hussein, the duly elected president of Iraq. I am willing to negotiate.

He tells the soldiers, which has a kind of weird, tells you something about his psychology. And actually, one of the ways they identify him, because I'm going to be sure it's him. is a scar that he had from being shot in that 1959 assassination attempt. We talked about right at the start. But of course, Saddam is then put on trial and he's handed over to the new Iraqi government that takes over, and it doesn't end well for him. And so on December 30, 2006, Saddam is executed by hanging by the new Iraqi government, which is actually, when you go back and watch videos of it, it is quite a disturbing scene.

It is, because it's filmed on a kind of grainy mobile phone footage. almost, isn't it? And they're shouting abuse at him as he's hung, the people who are doing it. It's really weird, isn't it? It is. And it doesn't really give you a great sense of the justice being meted out by the new Iraqi government at that time. But Saddam's body is buried the next day back near Tikrit, where it had all started for him. One story, Gordon, about Saddam in custody, though, which I think is quite illuminating about his blindness. toward what the Americans were actually up to, even toward the end, is, do you remember when he was on trial and he had grown out a beard, a thick beard?

There was speculation that the beard was to appeal to some of the Islamist tendencies of the judges. When in fact, do you know what the real story of the beard was? No, go. So at some point, while he was in custody, he got, Saddam got very sick. and had to be visited by a U.S. nurse. And the nurse came in and it treated him and Saddam had apparently flirted with the nurse. The nurse was not interested in the...

Was not interested in Saddam Hussein. In the duly elected president of Iraq. And Saddam asks one of the jailers, one of the handlers, why was she, you know, why was she not interested? And the handler made some joke about how American women really prefer men with beards

because at that time he had been shaved. And so he grew that beard in an attempt to appeal to this American nurse who had treated him. That is wild. It gives you the sense of just how distant he was from the reality

of what was going on in the American mind and consciousness and national security apparatus up till the very end. There was such a miscommunication misunderstanding between both sides. He just didn't understand. I think that's really important because that sense in which he's detached from reality, which I think we've got through talking about him, explain some of the weird decisions he takes,

some of the weird statements he makes. It's so interesting because he gets debriefed by both CIA and FBI. And you can read accounts of this as a book, Debriefing the President by John Nixon, where John Nixon, who's been a CIA leadership analyst studying Saddam, gets to go meet him and debrief him over his time in captivity. And so that's how we know all this stuff about Revolutionary Command Council meetings, because he and others talk about what was really going on at the time. And it is fascinating to just be able to piece together what was going on in his head

and how he wasn't quite the leader that people thought he was, which isn't to say he wasn't a murderous tyrant, but just more detached from reality. And of course, while they were hunting for Saddam in 2003, the occupation of Iraq turns into a disaster very quickly. I remember Iraqi exiles telling me it'll only take two weeks for the Americans to be seen as occupiers and they were pretty much right. There was no plan for the aftermath. It's a shocking part of it.

So you get looting, you get the decision to disband the Iraqi army, leaves lots of angry men with guns. I remember an Iraqi source telling me, well, there's lots of jihadists coming over the border from other Middle East countries to fight you Americans. I remember asking a British intelligence source about this and going, oh, we have no. nerd about that. You know, so you start to see all these kind of impacts very quickly as the whole situation unravels after the military victory. This is another piece of the intelligence picture that I do think bears just a brief mention. I know this is a series about WMD, but one of the areas that the analytic community, I think, should be commended for are the quality of the assessments about what a post-Saddam Iraq might look like. Because there were paper,

there was a paper done prior to the invasion by the Nick, the National Intelligence Council of the U.S., and it was titled Principal Challenges and Post it on Iraq. And it basically got everything right. You know, it talked about how Iraq was absolutely not fertile ground for an open democratic government. It talked about the risk of terrorist groups, jihadist groups, using the more permissive environment to set up safe havens and conduct attacks. It talked about the ethno-sectarian divisions of Iraq and how that would be fuel for civil conflict. And of course, that's exactly what we saw in this really civil war between Sunni and Shia that took place during the insurgency and the wake of the Iraq war. Talked about the prospects for guerrilla warfare

or insurgency against an occupation. So I don't say any of that to detract from the really important conversation on WMD, but that is another piece of this story that I think at least the Adelist got that right. And what is clear from all of the after-action reviews that have been done on this is that policymakers didn't spend any time with those assessments at all. Yeah. No. I mean, it is a whole other story, which is the failure to plan for the aftermath. But of course, the crucial thing is those weapons of mass destruction were never found. I mean, we were promising, you were promising at the start of this episode that we were going to reveal where they were. I'm afraid... This is the point. where we tell the audience they've been had.

A bit like intelligence analysts, you know, briefing their customers that we're sure you'll find the stuff. I'm afraid we've let them down badly because we've not found them yet. And no one has. We're however many years, 23 years on. So I guess as we come to the end, focusing on that WMD question, I mean, who's to blame? There've been so many inquiries and things like that. The first question out of the gate.

Whose fault is this? Well, it is because where do we assign blame? I mean, should we? I think it's interesting because I felt in the aftermath there was this question and the accusation that the politicians had lied about WMD and that became very much the narrative in the UK, which is that Tony Blair and others had lied about the WMD. I actually think it's much more complicated than that because Tony Blair says that he went to his intelligence chiefs, even on the eve of war, went to the Joint Intelligence Committee and said to them, are you sure, Saddam, has got this stuff and they said yes, he's relying on what they are told. The spies were the ones who got it wrong rather than the politicians lying about it. Now, that is not, before people have a go at me, to say that that excuses the politicians from responsibility because ultimately

it was a political decision to go to war. And it was Tony Blair and George W. Bush's decision that they were going to go to war and Tony Blair's commitment. And they are, just using the intelligence as a justification for a political decision that they are doing. So I think the ultimate political responsibility lies with the politicians. But I do think there is a massive intelligence failure because the public were told and they were told that the weapons were there. It is important context, though, for the entire debacle to say that everybody, foreign intelligence Services, the CIA, SIS, MI6, Hans Blix, the inspector. Hans Bix. Yeah. Think tanks, the UN, everybody thought Saddam had these weapons. This was a judgment that was held by

pretty much anybody who'd been looking at Iraq. And again, it's not to say that, oh, that excuses it, just because everyone else thinks it. But I think as we record this in 2026, almost everyone would would have absorbed some meme from the past 23 years that would say, oh, it was a ridiculous assessment and how could anyone have done this? Or, you know, the politicians lied. But the reality is that pretty much everybody in 2002 and 2003, including a lot of people in the Iraqi regime, thought that Saddam had these weapons. Yeah. There's an interesting line, which is that the French spies, for instance, so France doesn't go to war, stays out of the war. And the French present at the time, says, yeah, my people thought they were spies, but he says something interesting.

He says spy agencies sometimes intoxicate each other. Sounds very French. It's very French. It's this idea. They all kind of collective judgment. So I think there was a kind of collective view that no one was willing to challenge. And you're right. You know, the French believed it.

The Egyptians believed it. They all thought Iraq had the WMD. But there is something different about going to war on that basis to make the decision. to make the decision to go to war and to use that as the basis for going to war when it's not true. And I think that is deeply consequential and disturbing for lots of reasons. Yeah, this is an important point to be clear on as we're closing the series out. And I guess I'll put it to you as a question. Do you think that the intelligence was politicized?

That's a really good question. In my mind, it makes the analysts or the intelligence officers victims of the politicians who have strong-armed them or excluded information that analysts wanted included or vice versa to twist an analytic line for their own political purposes. I mean, that's a stark view of politicization, but that's not inaccurate. Whereas actually, I think it was a more fundamental intelligence failure. politicians were pressing the intelligence agencies for evidence to back something up which they wanted to be true and thought was true. But it is the job of an intelligence agency to resist political pressure.

So I think it's back to the what is the intelligence failure. I think there's three failures. There's the failure of analysis, the assumptions. There's the failure of collection. So that's the kind of new sources on trial, failure to validate, the failure to vet. And then there's a failure in the relationship between intelligence agencies and politicians, in a failure to perhaps say to the politicians, this is the limit of the intelligence. Don't go beyond that here and no further.

This is what we know. This is what we know with confidence. This is what we don't know with confidence. And I think that is also the responsibility of intelligence agencies to do that with their political masters and to some extent to resist pressure. So in a sense, I don't think it was politicization. I think it was a multi-layered intelligence failure. I also don't think it was politicization, although you can find examples of attempted politicization. I actually think not very successful politicization, to be quite honest, but attempted politicization in the process. You can find those.

We talked about one when Scooter Libby's office wanted to kill a assessment about the lack of connection between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda, right? That's, an example of just trying to strongarm the agency by having them recall a report that had been put out because you don't like the analytic line. But again, it's not a WMD and the agency held strong. I actually, when you look at WMD in particular, I agree with you. I don't think there was obviously tremendous political demand for information that would make the case for war. I think when you look at the record, you can't say that the analytic lines, the judgments were were politicized. And that it's actually, it's a, in some ways, a more disturbing systemic problem. And I think, I mean,

on the analytic side, at least, and it encompasses a bit of your point around both the analysis and the relationship between intelligence and policy. But I think there are, I'd probably make three points on what went wrong. We've talked about these to some degree along the way. The first one is there was analytic creep where assumptions became judgments. We talked about, everyone looked and said, Saddam failed to cooperate with UN inspectors because he was continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction. That was an assumption. It became the judgment, even after the facts had departed.

The second one is that there were rampant biases, unchecked biases in the analytic process. hindsight bias, which is basically we missed the nuclear program in the early 90s and don't want to miss it again. There's historical bias. Saddam had these weapons in the past. He used chemical weapons against the Kurds, therefore it's likely he has them again. And probably the biggest one, confirmation bias, which is just accepting facts as true if they comport with your view and then rejecting those that don't. So there are biases that infected everybody along the way. I think, though, and this is the third point, I think the biggest mistake was actually not the assessment itself.

And I don't know if you would agree or disagree with this, but I think with the information available, I think the assessment would have been the same. The assessment would have been that Saddam had these programs. But the problem is that the analysts never asked themselves how confident they were in those judgments. Yeah. Again, you'd probably get the same assessment, but you'd attach a low confidence statement to it. Not beyond doubt. Not beyond doubt. And you would have never allowed those judgments to appear without that caveat.

You know, for example, when I joined the agency in 2006, I mean, the analytic component was still reeling from the Iraq WMD debacle. and it factored deeply into our thinking when we were looking, for example, at like, Syrian use of chemical weapons during the Civil War. They started using them in 2012 in small quantities, you know, eventually ended up using them on a much larger scale in 2013. And initially, when they started using it, we believed that they were using it based on some pretty good information that we had. But we were forced because of this, because of Iraq WMD, we were forced. forced by our managers and by the new kind of techniques that had been absorbed in the agency to look very closely at how we knew what we knew, where our gaps were, and attach a confidence statement to it. And so we started with a low confidence statement that eventually over a

period of maybe three or four months became a high confidence statement as we filled in those gaps working with collectors and others to get a deeper sense of the actual intelligence picture and to be confident in why we knew what we knew. None of that was done in 2002 and 2003. It does bring us up to date because the legacy of Iraq there, there have been changes within MI6, within the UK and the intelligence community, with how it presents intelligence, how it talks about intelligence, enforcing politicians to only use certain language.

It was interesting, though, even when you got to the run-up to the war, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022, you could still see the legacy of Iraq because people in British intelligence and government were thinking, we want to present the intelligence about what Russia's intentions are because we've discovered them, but you could still see the nervousness about whether politicians might speak about it wrongly, whether people wouldn't trust it, all of that was the legacy of Iraq still shaping it. And I think making them to some extent overcautious in some cases, I think British intelligence had been overcautious in sharing information because it was so bruised by the experience of Iraq.

It's shaped, hasn't it? Both CIA, M.I.6, British government, American government. And it's shaped their intelligence agencies and led, I think, sometimes to an overcaution because of the scars of Iraq. But yes, there are certainly more kind of stricter controls in place. I mean, it is interesting, just to finish as we talk about this now in 2026 where you've got a war in Iran going on. because in many ways it's so different, isn't it? Because there's been no attempt by the US. In this case, it's the US and Israel, rather than the UK and US, but to justify the war

with all these, or get a UN resolution or, you know, the intelligence is kind of, you know, there's none of the, it's so interesting, isn't it? Because there's none of the public cases being made or the thoughts about dossiers or how to present the evidence. It's very different. And of course, you know, the other big difference is that the UK this time has made a very conscious decision, we are not going to be involved in this operation. And that again is such a shift from 2001, 2002, 2003, when Tony Blair felt we have to be in alongside the Americans. The military

wanted to do it. The intelligence agencies want to do it. In the current world, we've made a very conscious decision not to be alongside the Americans in this war. And I think that tells you quite a lot about how the world and how Britain and how Britain and America have changed since. I think maybe this is the place to close this out. I think the mention of Epic Fury and the war in Iran now highlights this interesting duality in which we are living in obviously a very, very different world where the U.S. has engaged again at a war of choice in the Middle East has not, though, attempted to justify really the proximate cause for that war with any public display of intelligence or any case

you know, really made to the American people. So we're in a very, very different world. And yet, I would argue that you can draw a line back from this war in Iran to this decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003. So there's this, everything has changed. And yet so much, and in fact, probably almost all of the major developments that have happened in the Middle East going back to 2003 are in some way either shaped, cause formed by this fateful decision to go to war based on this faulty intelligence about WMD back in 2003. That's right. I think that's a great place to close it with a just sense that this was one of the most

consequential decisions that was taken and based on this intelligence failure. So, well, we hope everyone who's been listening has enjoyed this deep dive into Iraq, WMD, a reminder, of course, that club members, you're going to be able to hear even more, because you're going to be able to hear from some of the key players in these decisions, people who are in the room at this interface between intelligence and politics, people like Mike Morel, who eventually becomes an acting director of the CIA, Richard Deerleb, who was head of MI6 at the time, and one, Alistair Campbell, who was Tony Blair's director of communication. So it's a real chance to really explore this with key participants for our club members.

so do sign up at the rest is classified.com. And of course, there's a live show, September the 4th to 5th, so do get your tickets for that. But otherwise, I guess, with Zabiba in the King echoing in our minds and Saddam's novels, what was the last one called Get Out or something like that? Maybe that should be a... I believe it where I was Get Out, Damned One.

Get Out, Damned One. Maybe that's on that note. Let's get out. We'll see you next time. See you next time. In intelligence information is only as reliable as the source behind it. It can sound convincing, but the real test is whether it holds up under scrutiny. And for brands, the same principle holds.

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