US: Frustrated at the failure to find Saddam Hussein's suspected stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, US and allied intelligence agencies have launched a major effort to determine if they were victims of bogus Iraqi defectors who planted disinformation to mislead the West before the war.
The goal, according to a senior US intelligence official, "is to see if false information was put out there and got into legitimate channels and we were totally duped on it." He added, "We're re-interviewing all our sources of information on this. This is the entire intelligence community, not just the US."
The far-reaching review was started after a political controversy earlier this summer over revelations that President Bush's claim in his State of the Union speech that Iraq had sought to import uranium from Niger was based on forged documents.
Although senior CIA officials insist defectors were only partly responsible for the intelligence that triggered the decision to invade Iraq last March, other intelligence officials now fear that key portions of the pre-war intelligence may have been flawed.
As evidence, officials say former Iraqi intelligence operatives have confirmed since the war that Saddam's regime sent "double agents" disguised as defectors to the West to plant fabricated intelligence. In other cases, Baghdad apparently tricked legitimate defectors into conveying untrue tips about weapons production and storage sites.
"They were shown bits of information, and led to believe there was an active weapons programme, only to be turned loose to make their way to Western intelligence sources," said the senior intelligence official. "Then, because they believe it, they pass polygraph tests . . . and the planted information becomes true to the West even if it was all made up to deceive us."
There is growing concern, said another US intelligence official, that "people were just telling us what we wanted to hear."
Saddam's motives for such a scheme may have been to bluff his enemies abroad, from Washington to Tehran, by sending false signals of his military might. Experts also say the dictator's defiance of the West, and its fear of his weapons of mass destruction, boosted his prestige at home and was a critical part of his power base in the Arab world.
Saddam also may have gambled that the failure by United Nations weapons inspectors to find specific evidence identified by bogus defectors ultimately would force the Security Council to lift sanctions imposed after the 1991 Gulf War. US officials now believe Saddam then hoped to covertly reconstitute his weapons programmes.
The current focus on Iraqi defectors reflects a new scepticism among members of the Iraq Survey Group, the 1,400-member team responsible for finding any illicit arms. In interviews, several current and former survey team members expressed growing disappointment over the inconclusive results of the search so far.
"We were prisoners of our own beliefs," said a senior US weapons expert who recently returned from a stint with the survey group. "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."