The Foreign Service Journal, March 2004

Two factors combined to create such an intense level of press inter- est in hearing the views of an obscure former mid-level State Department official. Even as the U.S. military rapidly established control over the Iraqi battlefield, it was beginning to become clear that the situation in Iraq was not unfold- ing the way the Bush administration had led the American people to expect. There were no “weapons of mass destruction,” but there was continuing armed resistance to the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq, resulting in an ever-lengthening list of American dead and wounded. While there were anonymous voices from inside gov- ernment whispering about how intelligence had been distorted to justify the war, the public had previously seen no names attached to these accusations. As a 25-year veteran of the U.S. Foreign Service, I was not a stranger to encounters with the public and with the press, but most of my work during those years was in the classified realm and most of my advice and analysis was for official consumption only. I had inter- nalized a professional code of conduct designed to protect the sources and methods used to acquire intel- ligence secrets and to encourage frank and open poli- cy deliberations inside government. I was concerned about inadvertently stepping over the line in dis- cussing subjects dealing with classified information. I was worried about being imprecise in describing the timing of events or the language used in analyses — particularly since I no longer had access to my chrono- logical files or to relevant official documents. The pos- sibility that I would unfairly characterize the work of esteemed colleagues or superiors also weighed heavily on me. Speaking Out The week following the refer- ence to me in The New York Times , I was quoted in a ground-breaking story in Newsweek , bannered on the cover with the words: “Iraq’s Weapons: How Bush Hyped the Threat.” While I declined many of the subsequent media requests, I gradually became more comfort- able explaining the reasons for my criticism of the administration’s justification for the war. In June 2003, I was interviewed by Bill Moyers for his “Now” program on PBS. In July, I participated in a press conference sponsored by the Arms Control Association, laying out my thoughts on the relative cul- pability of the political leadership and the intelligence community in misleading the public about the threat from Iraq. Within the next few weeks, I had long dis- cussions with the staffs of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. In October, I appeared on PBS’s “Frontline” (“War, Truth and Consequences”), CBS’s “60 Minutes II” (“The Man Who Knew”) and in Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker arti- cle, “The Stovepipe.” In spite of my growing confidence in being able to handle unanticipated questions from the press, I was nonetheless taken aback when a Colombian radio reporter asked why I had waited so long to go public with my story. If I had had information contrary to the administration’s account, he implied, did I not have a moral obligation to present it while the war could still have been prevented? My defensive and unconvinc- ing response led me later to ponder the question in a more rigorous way. I reflected on my initial surprise and anger at the statements made by Vice President Cheney to the VFW in August 2002 and President Bush to the U.N. General Assembly in September. Just as I was leaving government, the administration seemed to be aban- doning all scruples in exaggerating the nature of the Iraqi threat to the American people. The president and his aides were exploiting the fear of a nation still traumatized by 9/11 with unjustified speculations that Iraq could have nuclear weapons “within months” and ominous warnings that the first smoking gun could be F O C U S M A R C H 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 45 While the U.S. intelligence community has much to answer for, the buck should stop with the president. Greg Thielmann entered the Foreign Service in 1977, specializing in arms control and security issues during his 25-year career. In his last tour, before retiring from the Service in September 2002, he was acting director of the Office of Analysis for Strategic, Proliferation, and Military Issues in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department. He is now writing and lecturing on the use of intelligence in defense and foreign policy.