George Piro, a personable and handsome FBI agent, appeared on
60 Minutes Sunday to tell us Saddam Hussein’s secrets. The
36-year-old Lebanese-American was Saddam’s interrogator. In
addition to whatever the show disclosed about Saddam, it also
revealed a lot about how the U.S. media and bureaucracies have
handled and stoked the controversies over Operation Iraqi Freedom
(OIF) — basically, afflicted by chronic Alzheimer’s. The events
relevant to understanding OIF go back nearly 18 years — to Iraq’s
August 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Few people worked on Iraq all those
years. Still, those doing so now ought to know that history.
Neither 60 Minutes nor the FBI do.
Piro explained that when he finally asked Saddam about Iraq’s
weapons of mass destruction, Saddam replied that most were
destroyed by U.N. inspectors (UNSCOM) and the rest were destroyed
by Iraq. After their destruction, however, Saddam tricked the world
into believing Iraq still had them. “That was what kept him…in
power. That capability kept the Iranians away,” Piro affirmed.
Yet in the first four years following the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq
sought to do the opposite. It worked mightily to demonstrate that
all its banned weapons had been destroyed and economic sanctions
should be lifted. Baghdad was successful to a very significant
extent. By March 1995, considerable pressure existed in the U.N.
Security Council to reward the Iraqis for their cooperation and
lift sanctions. Congressional leaders complained the Clinton
administration was weak on Saddam, and the White House publicly
promised to veto any attempt to end
sanctions.
Yet the U.S. never had to use that veto. Although Iraq’s
chemical, nuclear and missile programs were thought to have been
neutralized, one issue remained outstanding — Iraq’s biological
program. UNSCOM began to address it in July, and as UNSCOM did so,
Saddam prepared to toss the inspectors out (which he actually did
three years later). In that context, Saddam’s son-in-law, Hussein
Kamil, who had overseen Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs,
defected. The regime panicked, fearing what Kamil might tell
UNSCOM. It wanted to control the flow of information, and it then
acknowledged that all its proscribed programs had been
much larger and more sophisticated than it had previously
disclosed.
Baghdad relinquished no further proscribed material. It claimed
to have unilaterally destroyed what it had just admitted once
having and provided no coherent account of the destruction of that
material. UNSCOM concluded that the unilateral destruction — in
violation of the U.N. resolution which called for UNSCOM to
supervise that activity — had been a shell-game to conceal the
retention of some of the supposedly destroyed material.
In particular, Iraq’s biological program remained a “black hole,” as UNSCOM chairman, Ambassador Richard
Butler, repeatedly complained. In early 1998, editors and reporters
of the New York Times met with Butler, who warned that Iraq had “enough biological material
like anthrax or botulin toxin to ‘blow away Tel Aviv.’” Days
before, President Bill Clinton had warned similarly, “Think how many can be
killed by just a tiny bit of anthrax, and think about how it’s not
just that Saddam Hussein might put it on a Scud missile an anthrax
head, and send it on to some city he wants to destroy. Think about
all the other terrorists and other bad actors who could just parade
through Baghdad and pick up their stores.”
EVEN IF WE ACCEPT that Saddam tricked UNSCOM, two successive U.S.
administrations, indeed, pretty much the entire world, into
believing that he retained dangerous proscribed weapons when they
no longer existed, this still leaves a major problem. It fails to
explain the first four years after the 1991 war — when Iraq did
the exact opposite, working to convince the world that its banned
weapons programs had been destroyed and nearly succeeding in doing
so.
Other explanations exist. One member of UNSCOM told this author
that in April 2003, shortly after Baghdad fell to U.S. forces, an
Iraqi biological scientist called to tell him that part of Iraq’s
biological program had been moved out of the country and part of it
had been destroyed shortly before OIF began. Indeed, James R. Clapper Jr. headed the National
Geospatial-Intelligence Agency during Operation Iraqi Freedom. He
is now Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and the Director
of Defense Intelligence. In October 2003, Clapper told reporters
that “satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq
into Syria, just before the American invasion in March, led him to
believe that illicit weapons material ‘unquestionably’ had been
moved out of Iraq,” as the New York Times reported.
The Iraq Survey Group learned that Iraqi intelligence operated five
biological laboratories until the start of OIF. In 2004, the
Pentagon debated whether to release a cache of captured Iraqi
documents. Individuals familiar with those papers say they
justified the war. Then Under Secretary of Defense for
Intelligence, Stephen Cambone, however, argued against publicly
releasing them, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sided with
Cambone. Subsequently, a handful of those documents were leaked to
a small on-line news service.
Among the leaked Iraqi papers is one detailing the production of small amounts of
anthrax and another detailing the production of small amounts of
mustard gas. Such quantities could be used for terrorism.
Ronald Kessler also interviewed Piro, and Kessler’s latest book,
The Terrorist Watch, includes three important points
absent from the 60 Minutes interview. First, “Saddam was
very smart — a lot smarter than we gave him credit for in the
West,” Piro told Kessler. Second, “after Desert Storm [the 1991
war], Saddam considered himself to be at war with the United
States,” Piro explained. Finally, Saddam’s foremost concern was his
legacy. Before OIF began, Saddam was offered a comfortable exile in
Saudi Arabia, but Saddam told Piro “he cared more about what people
would think of him in five hundred or a thousand years than they
did that day.”
These observations knock down two views embraced by Middle East
experts after the 1991 war that helped buttress Bill Clinton’s
do-nothing policy toward Iraq — that Saddam was “stupid”
and that his foremost concern was his own survival and the survival of his regime. Taken together, Piro’s
three observations suggest that sometime in the future, when
Operation Iraqi Freedom is no longer a political football,
Americans will likely learn that Saddam was indeed a major threat
and that he was not idle in the 12 years between the end of the
1991 war and the start of the second war.
