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Did Iraqi Defectors Dupe U.S.?
Aug. 28, 2003

CBS

U.S. officials suspect that some of the intelligence used to justify war against
Iraq came from defectors who were lying or reporting false information planted
by Saddam Hussein's regime, a newspaper reports.

In the five months since war began, no weapons have been found, and the case for
war has come under scrutiny. President Bush withdrew an allegation that Iraq
sought uranium in Africa, intelligence analysts accused the White House of
skewing prewar data, and internal government documents revealed divisions over
the nature of the Iraqi threat.

The suspicion about defectors suggests waning confidence that weapons will be
found. And while U.S. experts say they have evidence that Saddam planned to
acquire materials for a small-scale weapons program, there is to date no
evidence that any weapons were produced after the first Gulf War, says the
report.

According to The Los Angeles Times, several intelligence agencies are reviewing
what defectors told them. "We're reinterviewing all our sources of information
on this. This is the entire intelligence community, not just the U.S," said one
senior intelligence official.

The Times reports Iraqi operatives have said that fake defectors were dispatched
to the West to mislead Saddam's enemies, and even legitimate defectors may have
been allowed to see false intelligence, so they would report it to the West
while believing it was real.

Saddam may have manipulated defectors to hype his military power to regional
rivals like Iran and Israel, The Times reports.

Officials stress that defectors' debriefings weren't the only evidence against
Iraq. Satellite photos and intercepted communications also helped the case. But
defectors provided a crucial human element - human intelligence or "humint" -
that bolstered the administration's already strong suspicions about Saddam's
alleged arsenal.

Defectors are known to be behind reports of mobile biological weapons labs and
the British claim that Iraq was prepared to fire illegal weapons in 45 minutes.
According to Secretary of State Colin Powell, defectors also alleged a link
between Iraq and al Qaeda.

An intelligence official told The Times the defectors "were just telling us what
we wanted to hear." Even before the war, there were doubts about defectors
inflating their knowledge to get asylum and money from the West.

A senior weapons expert just back from Iraq was quoted in the newspaper saying:
"We were prisoners of our own beliefs. We said Saddam Hussein was a master of
denial and deception. Then when we couldn't find anything, we said that proved
it, instead of questioning our own assumptions."

The review of defectors is part of a broad CIA examination of the quality of
their intelligence. It is waiting for results from the Iraq Survey Group, the
1,400-person team hunting for weapons evidence in Iraq. The Survey group is due
to issue a preliminary report in September.

Some survey group members are confident weapons will be found, as more Iraqis
cooperate with them. Military leaders echo that hope, pointing to last month's
discovery of buried Russian jets as evidence that Saddam might have hidden
almost anything beneath the sands of Iraq.

But The Times reports there is no sign yet of the stockpile of biological and
chemical weapons the administration said Iraq hoarded, or of a large
up-and-running program as the White House claimed.

What the evidence collected so far does point to is that, sometime between 1996
and 2000, Saddam decided to drop large-scale WMD production in favor of laying
the groundwork for a small-scale production of poisonous agents if they were
needed, the Times reports. That effort would use dual-use civilian equipment to
churn out chemical or biological weapons.

"They set up dual-use facilities so they could cook up what they needed, when
they needed it. But otherwise they would be making whiter-than-white washing
detergent or something," said a survey team member.

But there is no evidence any weapons were produced after 1991. According to a
senior group member, no one on the survey team has found "the smoking gun."

War supporters will argue that even a plan for a small-scale program was reason
enough to oust Saddam. But critics will question whether war, rather than a
continuation of U.N. sanctions and inspections, was necessary.