Excerpt: Iraq Confidential

By Scott Ritter, AlterNet. Posted October 17, 2005.

Author's Note: I wrote Iraq Confidential because I felt there was a real need to set the record straight about the reality behind the myth -- the fact that the now-debunked case made by the Bush administration for invading Iraq revolving around the alleged existence of WMD in Iraq was not a product of innocent mistakes made by the CIA in assessing Iraqi capabilities. Rather, it was the result of a concerted effort on the CIA's part to maintain the public perception of non-compliance by Iraq as part of an overall strategy of regime change.

AlterNet has chosen to highlight one of the passages in my book which illustrates this reality in a dramatic fashion: the moment when I am confronted with the fact that my own government has not only lied to me about what it was doing in Iraq, but also that these actions were undermining the credibility of the inspection process and placing the lives and well-being of inspectors at risk.

I had, since February 1996, been running a sensitive operation in Iraq known as the Special Collection Element, or SCE. The SCE team was comprised of British military personnel who would intercept Iraqi communications in order to ascertain whether or not the Iraqis were hiding any weapons of mass destruction, or WMD.

I had approached the CIA, for assistance in this effort. At first it appeared that the CIA was cooperating, but after a tip-off from British intelligence that something was afoul, I began to investigate the true nature of the CIA's so-called "assistance."

Much to my dismay, I found that the CIA was using the SCE as a cover for the conduct of its own intelligence collection effort, which was focused not on the search for WMD, but rather America's unilateral policy of regime change in Iraq.

The following excerpt picks up when I started looking into the role of a U.S. Air Force officer (whom I called "the Engineer") in the CIA's Iraq planning.

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As I continued to dig, the case of the Engineer became even murkier. From September 1995 to June 1996, he had undertaken numerous "maintenance" visits to Iraq which bypassed the normal United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) chain of approval. The UNSCOM communications officer, an experienced Australian major, had raised several questions to Colonel James Moore, the UNSCOM director for operations, about the Engineer's activities, and tried to bring them under tighter UNSCOM control.

The Engineer told the Australian major to mind his own business, and in an extraordinary exchange witnessed by several, did the same to Colonel Moore, although Moore outranked the Engineer. In a stunning turn of events, Colonel Moore tried, in late 1995, to file charges of insubordination against the Engineer, only to be rebuked by a senior air force general, who told Colonel Moore that if he continued to obstruct the work of the Engineer it would be he, not the engineer, who would be facing charges.

This episode had gone by largely unnoticed in 1995, with other issues such as the Jordanian gyro intercept mission taking center-stage. But in retrospect, it made perfect sense. UNSCOM 120, with its communications intercept mission, was proceeding too fast for the CIA's own plans for a communications intercept operation in Iraq, and had to be slowed down. That is why the CIA deliberately downgraded the promised level of support at the last minute, offering us utterly substandard recording devices to take into the field in November 1995.

Steve Richter [head of the CIA's Near East Division], we now knew, had been planning a coup against Saddam Hussein. The CIA needed the best possible intelligence about the security of Saddam Hussein, so that the coup plotters would be able to know exactly where to strike and when. The CIA also needed to keep track of the Iraqi military order of battle; that is, where specific military units were, how many men they had, what kind of training they had had, and whether they'd be likely to defect.

Gradually, as my investigation progressed, through a number of different sources, a picture emerged. The information that the CIA needed, and more, could be accessed through an effective communications intercept program. The CIA, and their colleagues at the National Security Agency, had done this sort of work before, usually using U.S. embassy buildings as a base from which to carry out their information collection. But there was no U.S. embassy in Iraq, no place for them to operate from. Moe Dobbs and his CIA paramilitaries had actually carried out a test communications intercept operation in September-October 1993, using the UNSCOM 63 inspection as the cover. The goal was to determine if a sufficient collection operation could be carried out from the hotels where the inspectors stayed. In the end this plan was scrapped as too risky.

The CIA had long been involved in placing a remote camera surveillance system in Iraq, using the Engineer. Back in early 1995, when the discussion of mounting a coup against Saddam Hussein started gaining momentum, someone at the CIA posed the question, "Why not convert the camera monitoring system into a communications intercept system?"

Scott Ritter was UN Chief Weapons Inspector in Iraq from 1991-1998 and is author of "Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of America's Intelligence Conspiracy," (Nation Books, 2005).

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