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Out Damn Blot: A Letter to Colin Powell
By Ray McGovern (about the author) Page 4 of 6 page(s)
Before the attack on Iraq, Tenet's deputy, John McLaughlin, was repeatedly briefed on Sabri's information, but complained that it was at variance with "our best source" - a reference to the infamous "Curveball," the con-man whom German intelligence had warned the CIA not to take seriously.
You may recall hearing that on the evening before your U.N. speech, Drumheller warned Tenet not to use the information from Curveball on mobile biological weapons laboratories; Tenet gave Drumheller the brush-off.
The CIA artists' renderings of those laboratories, to which you called such prominent attention during your speech, were spiffy, but bore no relationship to reality. Tenet and McLaughlin knew this almost as well as Sabri and Habbush did.
"We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and rails," you will recall telling the world. Later, you lamented publicly that you had not been warned about Curveball either.
McLaughlin seemed to confirm that this was so, in an interview with the Washington Post in 2006: "If someone had made those doubts clear to me, I would not have permitted the reporting to be used in Secretary Powell's speech."
This is highly disingenuous, even by McLaughlin's and Tenet's standards, since they had deliberately chosen to ignore Drumheller's warning. I know Drumheller; he is a far better bet for truthfulness that the other two.
Outright Lies
Although I am against the death penalty, I can sympathize with the vehement reaction of normally taciturn Carl Ford, head of State Department intelligence at the time. Ford has revealed that both Tenet and McLaughlin went to extraordinary lengths, and even took a personal hand in trying to salvage some credibility for the notorious Curveball.
In an interview for Hubris, a book by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, Carl Ford spared no words, asserting that Tenet's and McLaughlin's analysis "was not just wrong, they lied...they should have been shot."
Though I've been around a while, I am not the best judge of character, Colin, and perhaps I am being too credulous in giving you the benefit of the doubt concerning what you knew - or didn't. It could be, I suppose, that you were fully briefed on Naji Sabri, Habbush, Curveball, and all the rest of it, and have been able to orchestrate plausible denial.
If that is the case, I suppose it would seem safer to you to let sleeping dogs lie.
If, on the other hand, what my former colleagues say about your having been fenced off from this key intelligence is true, your reaction seems a bit ... how shall I describe it? ... understated.
Perhaps you are too long gone from the Bronx. Back there, back then, letting folks use you and make a fool of you without any response was just not done.
It was the equivalent to running away when someone was messing with your sister. And letting oneself be bullied always set a bad precedent, affirming for the bullies that they can push people around - especially understated ones - and risk nothing.
In sum, the CIA had both the Iraqi foreign minister and the Iraqi intelligence chief "turned" and reporting to us in the months before the war (in Naji Sabri's case) and the weeks before your U.N. speech (in the case of Tahir Jalil Habbush).
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