The Foreign Service Journal, March 2004

in the form of a mushroom cloud — assertions that had no basis in the sober assessments of intelli- gence professionals. President Bush announced to the world the interception of high- strength aluminum tubes bound for Iraq in a way that implied there was no doubt the tubes were head- ed for Saddam’s nuclear weapons program. The truth was that the destination of the tubes had been debated intensely within the U.S. government for months. Both the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and the Department of Energy, based on the analyses of the most knowledge- able experts at the national laboratories, judged these particular tubes unsuited for use in centrifuges to enrich uranium, and concluded that they were more likely intended for the casings of conventional artillery rockets — an assessment subsequently proven to be correct. The National Intelligence Council and White House spokesmen acknowledged differences of opin- ion in response to press inquiries, but publicly mini- mized the significance of the official INR and DOE institutional assessments as merely the views of “some analysts.” Even as the path to further progress on the enforce- ment of U.N. Security Council resolutions was reopened with the return of U.N. inspectors to Iraq in November, the administration ratcheted up its rhetoric. In his 2003 State of the Union address, President Bush publicly endorsed a British report on Iraqi attempts to procure uranium ore from Africa even though Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet had warned the White House by telephone and memorandum against using it three months earlier. In spite of the widespread doubts about the report that I remembered from INR’s internal analysis early in 2002, the classified National Intelligence Assessment on Iraqi WMD in October of that year cited the report as key evidence that “Iraq had begun vigorously trying to procure uranium ore and yellowcake.” The White House chose to publicize this dubious report some three months after the intelligence community had finally received the supposedly confirmatory source document, which was quickly rec- ognized as a forgery when provid- ed to the International Atomic Energy Agency. The resigning director of the U.S. Iraq Survey Group, David Kay, has implied that intelligence analysts were almost entirely responsible for public misunder- standings about Iraq. I believed then and believe now that the intelligence professionals were misused both by the senior leader- ship of the CIA and by the political leadership of the country. While the U.S. intelligence community has much to answer for, the buck should stop with the president who pro- vided a polemic rather than an honest assessment to the American people on an issue of war and peace. The last straw for me was the failure of the execu- tive branch (and the Congress) to require from the intelligence community an updated assessment of Iraq’s weapons programs following the reinsertion of U.N. inspectors. By the time the U.S. launched its attack on Iraq, the International Atomic Energy Agency had already exposed the forgery used to sus- tain the African uranium story. It had already con- cluded definitively that the aluminum tubes were not being used in Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. U.N. inspectors on the ground had already been able to resolve ambiguities about the nature of some suspi- cious new construction at suspect sites detected by national technical means. And the inspectors were in the process of reversing Iraqi violations of U.N. restrictions on missile development. But a dormant nuclear program and a dismantled missile program were not what the administration needed to lead the nation to war. After all, Iraq’s nuclear program — as the seed of the only real “weapon of mass destruction” — was the centerpiece of its campaign to raise the alarm about the urgent necessity of military action. Trust but Verify Once I had retired from the Foreign Service in September 2002, I did what I could to expose the serial distortions the administration was disseminating. I con- tributed information to a U.S. News and World Report F O C U S 46 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / M A R C H 2 0 0 4 Just as I was leaving government service in the fall of 2002, the administration seemed to be abandoning all scruples in exaggerating the Iraqi threat.