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[SPEAKER_03]: I'm Michael Isikoff and welcome to another edition of the spy talk podcast, Jeff Stein can't be with us today and Karen Greenberg will be joining us in a moment, but we're going to dispense with the usual weekend review discussion we have because we've got a really special guest actually guests coming on to discuss what may have been
[SPEAKER_03]: The biggest, most colossal intelligence failure in the CIA's history, and I'm speaking, of course, about the saga of Curveball, the Iraqi exile, whose claims about mobile biological labs inside Iraq, were used as a principle justification.
[SPEAKER_03]: for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, you go back to Colin Powell's speech to the U.N. and the curveball claims he doesn't use the name, of course, but the
[SPEAKER_03]: assertions are front and center in Powell's speech that mentioned like Bush in his 2003 State of the Union and in my own reporting, at the time, these reports coming in from the Germans about the claims of this guy curveball were absolutely essential.
[SPEAKER_03]: to the Bush administration's case for war.
[SPEAKER_03]: And of course, we now know it was all baloney.
[SPEAKER_03]: Curveball was a fabricator from the outset.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we're going to talk to a CIA operative analyst who had a cat bird seat into the Curveball fiasco.
[SPEAKER_03]: Jerry Watson, a 31-year veteran of the CIA, who's written a huge book about the curveball story that he's trying to get cleared by the CIA.
[SPEAKER_03]: He has the CIA is blocking at it, so he's now suing his former employer, and we'll also
[SPEAKER_03]: The Los Angeles Times reporter who wrote a key book about Curve Ball many years ago.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's quite a discussion, it's a long one, but a one well worth listening to.
[SPEAKER_03]: So without further ado, let's go right to our interview with Jerry Watson.
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, we are now joined by Jerry Watson, former veteran CIA, covert operative and analyst, who is now suing his former employer, the CIA.
[SPEAKER_03]: And we're going to dig into that.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's over a book he has written, a massive book.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think over a thousand pages, documenting what many
[SPEAKER_03]: intelligence failure, uh, perhaps in the CIA's history, um, Jerry, welcome to Spitalk.
[SPEAKER_03]: All right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: I appreciate you having me here.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is a subject of great interest to me and I'm sure a lot of spy talk listeners, but let's like just walk us through, first of all, you're background at the CIA, what you did very briefly, and how you got on to the case of curveball.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, basically I started with the CIA in 1986 April of 1986.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I had applied to a lot of different government agencies while I was in graduate school the process is very slow for finally getting in anyway I did finally get in in 1986 I came in to the director of operations as a case officer with through all the training everything was posted overseas did my first tour and then.
[SPEAKER_05]: then return back to the United States, I had married an analyst at the CIA, which actually makes it very convenient because we both have the security clearances and have gone through all that process.
[SPEAKER_05]: So you don't have to worry about disclosing anything at Pillow Talk.
[SPEAKER_05]: No, but we did.
[SPEAKER_05]: Our issues would overlap sometimes and so we'd we'd we'd pass and I kitchen a lot in the middle of the night because she's she's was going off to brief and and I've just come home for writing uh finished intelligence and we'd sort of pass and I kitchen sometimes because she had to go in early and I came home late.
[SPEAKER_05]: But anyway, so I can't just say, I was fast.
[SPEAKER_03]: One of the nuggets in Bob Drogans piece that he wrote for Spy Talk about you, a two-parter, is that your marriage among the fellow CIA person is not unique.
[SPEAKER_03]: In fact, there's a whole section on the CIA's website, Love at Langley.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, I think that was part of the push.
[SPEAKER_05]: to sort of be family friendly because when when we got married in 1988 just before we went overseas they were not happy that that I was getting married.
[SPEAKER_05]: I remember my my personnel officer
[SPEAKER_05]: which he heard, it was very disappointing, and said, you know, we had such plans for you.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the reason he is is because when you're a case officer and you get married, now the agency has to deal not only with your needs, but now a spouse.
[SPEAKER_05]: And at that time, it was a very male-dominated organization and they really didn't want to have to deal with somebody else just because you wanted to get married.
[SPEAKER_05]: So now they realize that is time goes on.
[SPEAKER_05]: They've got to deal with this issue.
[SPEAKER_05]: So they're trying to be more family friendly.
[SPEAKER_05]: I think that's yeah, and more, more people started to get married from inside agency, but also mirroring people from outside because then they have to go through a process to make sure they're approved by the agency because if they don't approve that person, you'll have to resign.
[SPEAKER_03]: But they don't have to approve your marriage.
[SPEAKER_05]: I see no, but they'll decide whether or not that person is approved for you to be married to them.
[SPEAKER_05]: Why you work there?
[SPEAKER_05]: if they don't trust them, person, then you're told to resign.
[SPEAKER_01]: So whether it's a liability or not, that's kind of interesting.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: So anyway, so I went in.
[SPEAKER_05]: I did that for, I was a case I was for about 10 years and then I decided case officers are generalists.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I wanted to be, I was jealous of the analysts.
[SPEAKER_05]: I wanted to be an expert on an issue.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I moved over to the director
[SPEAKER_05]: and became an analyst.
[SPEAKER_05]: And for the first, it must have been seven years, six years.
[SPEAKER_05]: I worked with providing intelligence support and material support for the inspections in Iraq, for the UN weapons inspectors.
[SPEAKER_05]: We would help through working through an office at the US Department of State.
[SPEAKER_05]: We would help provide personnel to go on these inspections.
[SPEAKER_05]: The material they need, you know, any sort of support.
[SPEAKER_05]: Because this was, of course, in the interest of the NSA's government.
[SPEAKER_05]: to have these inspections.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I did that for a while and then I moved over to be a line analyst and my account was on Iraq.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was one of three analysts on what was called the Iraq BW team for biological warfare.
[SPEAKER_05]: We had three analysts, one did focus on research and developments,
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's how I got involved in the whole rack issue and I'm terrible and one point that Bob made in his piece that that I think in retrospect is pretty significant in trying to understand how the CIA got things so wrong about Iraqi WMD.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it dates back to, I guess, what was it December, 98, Clinton bombs wreck, um, because he says they're not, um, uh, fulfilling their inspection, their blocking the inspections and the blocking them and not being, not being fully transparent.
[SPEAKER_05]: And, and that was desert flocks when they bombed in December of 1908.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I was there in 1998 in the summer.
[SPEAKER_05]: And yeah, I was a weapons inspector, right?
[SPEAKER_05]: We were running out of personnel to send over there because they all had technical expertise.
[SPEAKER_05]: And when we were starting to, when that pool gets smaller, after you send people over for three or four times, they start to say, well, I can't, you know, I can't go again, I got a job, I got family.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so we're running out of people to send and we're qualified.
[SPEAKER_05]: So some of us would volunteer and say, well, we'll go.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so that's why I did.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I was there during the summer of 1998.
[SPEAKER_05]: And yes, the Iraqis obstructed us.
[SPEAKER_05]: We had a kind of a battle with them with the Air Force headquarters over a document.
[SPEAKER_05]: We found it a safe that gave the actual accounting numbers for the actual amount of CW chemical weapons,
[SPEAKER_05]: that were used during the runner rock war.
[SPEAKER_05]: That was very important to material balance.
[SPEAKER_05]: If they use this much, how much do they have left?
[SPEAKER_05]: And so that contradicted what the Iraqi said officially given us.
[SPEAKER_05]: So that turned into a real battle where it got pretty tense.
[SPEAKER_03]: But we made it a point.
[SPEAKER_03]: The point I was going to make about that though is as obstructive as they were.
[SPEAKER_03]: prior to the bombing after the bombing.
[SPEAKER_03]: So Dom kicks the inspectors out.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so now you've got no, if I understand it correctly, no window into what Iraq is up to at all.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, actually, the inspectors left Iraq because things were getting too dangerous.
[SPEAKER_05]: And what's said, I'm dead is after the bombing, he just didn't allow him back in.
[SPEAKER_05]: So the US government of course is now concerned present Clinton at the time, you know, because now we have no eyes.
[SPEAKER_05]: We don't know what's going on in the country.
[SPEAKER_05]: We really didn't have a lot of sources there of our own.
[SPEAKER_05]: The UN, we weren't spying on the UN.
[SPEAKER_05]: We were trying to help them in their inspections.
[SPEAKER_05]: But we need it.
[SPEAKER_01]: That was my question.
[SPEAKER_01]: How does the UN?
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm just curious about that relationship between UN and how that conversation went and you know who got who reported to whom you know what I'm saying was there a format process for reporting in or what was that?
[SPEAKER_05]: What?
[SPEAKER_05]: Again, we were interested in what Unscom is finding out on the ground in Iraq, of course.
[SPEAKER_05]: And through our support, we can learn some of that.
[SPEAKER_05]: Now, we weren't spying on them.
[SPEAKER_05]: This was voluntary on their part, and they didn't have to tell us anything if they didn't want to.
[SPEAKER_05]: But we needed a dialogue so that we could help them with, hey, here are some intelligence.
[SPEAKER_05]: You might check out this site, or, you know, if you need some support over here, we can provide that.
[SPEAKER_05]: We weren't the only ones doing this.
[SPEAKER_05]: All the the other countries involved were doing the same thing and they were so they didn't necessarily report to us or even share us information, but we would talk to some of the inspectors who would come back and debrief them.
[SPEAKER_05]: That was my job for six years is the analyst
[SPEAKER_05]: these American inspectors who were on these teams and see if they're willing to be debriefed voluntarily.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I did that.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that we got a lot of good information off that.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, and again, I want to stress that you and is not, you know, they're not allowing by to spies in there.
[SPEAKER_05]: They're need they need to support.
[SPEAKER_05]: And this is one way we could leverage that support is can you let us know what's happening to.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I should point out that we've just been joined by Bob Drogan, storied former Los Angeles Times reporter and author of, until now, the definitive book on curveball subject of our talk today.
[SPEAKER_03]: So Bob, welcome.
[SPEAKER_03]: welcome to spy talk here.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you for I'm writing so we're going to continue with Gerry and then we'll bring you into the discussion to give us your thoughts on what he said to say but just picking up on on where we left off Gerry.
[SPEAKER_03]: So in 2000
[SPEAKER_03]: Clinton leaves 2001, Clinton leaves office, were you convinced that Iraq had WMD and how solid if so was your conviction that it still had chemical and biological weapons?
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, and I addressed this in my in my book, yeah, we were, we were not.
[SPEAKER_05]: fully convinced, we believed that WMD may be there because Sennon made WMD before, so he obviously knows how to make it.
[SPEAKER_05]: So he can make it again.
[SPEAKER_05]: He's still got the same people.
[SPEAKER_05]: He's got the material, so so we were, we analysts and intelligence analysts, not just in the U.S., but also the breads and the Germans.
[SPEAKER_05]: We were.
[SPEAKER_05]: Following this, trying to figure out where anything is, but yes, we did believe it was there, but because we didn't have concrete solid intelligence saying they really did have it, we had to use qualifiers and caveats in our reporting.
[SPEAKER_05]: So we had to say, Saddam may have a weapons program.
[SPEAKER_05]: He may have WMD.
[SPEAKER_05]: He could be doing this.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's important because unless you are 100% convinced and you can prove that, you really can't say that I'm has WMD.
[SPEAKER_05]: You have to say he may have it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, so that's what brings us to, you know, what changed and one of the big things that changed was the reports that start coming in from the Germans about a guy codenamed curveball right so let's get right to that and when you first heard and saw these reports and what your reaction was okay so so again.
[SPEAKER_05]: Before I went into the the rack BW team, I was still doing the support for Ranscom.
[SPEAKER_05]: So Kerbal showed up in Germany in late November, 1999, and he had traveled from Iraq and on his own and got there.
[SPEAKER_05]: He, the Germans picked him up as Bob has said out of the
[SPEAKER_05]: And they started a two-day briefing because he had some very interesting information with Emma Grace.
[SPEAKER_05]: You want to go through the immigration in your country and talk to them and find out, do any of them have any good information that intelligence will like to have.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so every country does this.
[SPEAKER_05]: So of course the Germans were doing that.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's earned or trying to find out, do you have these Emma Grace know anything?
[SPEAKER_05]: So they got to profit, to curve all, and he
[SPEAKER_05]: told on this story about these mobile VW plants.
[SPEAKER_05]: They started disseminating, they started sharing that information with what was called Defense Human Service at the time.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's the operational collection arm of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
[SPEAKER_05]: So they had a close relationship closer than CIA with the Germans.
[SPEAKER_05]: because of the history, I mean, it goes back decades.
[SPEAKER_05]: So they, so the journalists started sharing the information, Kerbal's reporting with defense human.
[SPEAKER_05]: Defense human would disseminate that to the community, U.S. and tells the community, and we would, we analyst would see these reports.
[SPEAKER_05]: So that's really when it started in January, February 2000.
[SPEAKER_05]: The first time I ever heard of this guy was not until summer of 2000,
[SPEAKER_05]: And at that time, I was working with Unscom on, we had concerns that the Iraqis had restarted a UAV program that would produce UAVs that could carry spray tanks to deliver BW.
[SPEAKER_05]: This was a real actual program.
[SPEAKER_05]: declared by the Iraqis back in 1991.
[SPEAKER_05]: So in 1995 all of a sudden we see them restarting what appear to be this same program.
[SPEAKER_05]: So the senior analyst on the Iraq BW team before I moved to that office, she came to see me and said, hey, can liquid a liquid slurry of BW agent, which is what
[SPEAKER_05]: can that be used in aerial spray tanks?
[SPEAKER_05]: And I said, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, that's perfect for it.
[SPEAKER_05]: So that increased her confidence and, and of course, if you increase my confidence, and in our assessments.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so she, she just said,
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, the German B&D has this source, he's an Iraqi engineer, and that's all I knew, and that's all she was sure with me.
[SPEAKER_05]: Because his reporting ever since the beginning was in restricted channels, and I was not ready into it.
[SPEAKER_05]: She was, and so was the junior analyst that she worked with.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so that's all they told me later on in September of 2001, just before 911, I moved over and
[SPEAKER_05]: became a member of that Iraqi W team and minds on weaponization.
[SPEAKER_05]: So Kerbal didn't have any information on weaponization.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I'm not ready into the program still in 2001, but they were.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I only knew what they were telling me.
[SPEAKER_05]: And they would tell me,
[SPEAKER_05]: A lot of the good things, but they never really told me any of the bad things that they were finding out about them.
[SPEAKER_05]: So that caused a problem.
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to get to that in a moment and by the way, the full name of Kurt Wall is Rafi Ahmed Al-Janabi.
[SPEAKER_03]: And when he starts, when these reports start circulating by,
[SPEAKER_03]: defense intelligence agency and there's what something like 90 such reports that get filed over that time.
[SPEAKER_03]: That really does change the calculus on what the CIA thought it knew about WMD and maybe we'll bring Bob in at this point.
[SPEAKER_03]: How significant were these reports from DIA about
[SPEAKER_03]: the intelligence community's assessment of WMD and, of course, in the Bush administration's case as well.
[SPEAKER_02]: So my understanding is, and it's been a while since I've been involved on this, but my understanding is when he first came out at the end of 1999 and started speaking to the B&D all through 2000 and 2001, and they're filing the support.
[SPEAKER_02]: It wasn't getting a whole lot of notice.
[SPEAKER_02]: What happened was 9-11.
[SPEAKER_02]: And after 9-11, when suddenly the Bush administration, the White House is suddenly looking for, it suddenly accusing Saddam Hussein of somehow being involved with 9-11, which was the CIA pushed back on.
[SPEAKER_02]: The CIA did not push back on at all on this question of WMD, which the Dick Cheney and others in the administration were really harping on by the mid by the middle of
[SPEAKER_02]: when Jerry said a minute ago that they were caveats and they may have this and they may have that by the fall of 2002 when the CIA and the whole national intelligence community issues something called the National Intelligence Estimate, which is supposed to be the gold standard.
[SPEAKER_02]: of finished intelligence products and sends it over to Congress and normally those kinds of things take.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm told six months, eight months a long long time through a very extensive review process.
[SPEAKER_02]: They bang that puppy out in something like 19 days and it did not have those caveats and did not have any of those things.
[SPEAKER_02]: It just says, we assess he has with high confidence and so on.
[SPEAKER_02]: And in the case of, to answer your questions specifically, Mike, when, partly because the, in the 1990s, right, when unskown was in a rock and is conducting all of these inspections and they find this enormous chemical weapons program that bigger than they expected, right.
[SPEAKER_02]: They find a biological weapons program that they did not anticipate and it's more sophisticated than they do and they find a a nascent
[SPEAKER_02]: nuclear program that they had not anticipated, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So they are seeing this stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: So we move up to 2002 and suddenly because of curveball and they were putting that builds up around it, they suddenly have this high confidence that he has a biological weapons program.
[SPEAKER_02]: And the guys over on the chemical weapons side, and it's a lot easier to make chemical weapons agent.
[SPEAKER_02]: They're basically pesticides with, you know, juicing them up a little bit.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a very, you know, they've been used since World War One.
[SPEAKER_02]: When they read that, and they learned that the BW side of the shop right over at where Jerry is working in the weapons side in Winpack that they have this this guy and they are absolutely they jack up their assessments and suddenly they go from the low confidence he may have yeah he's definitely got it because if he's got the BW then these are things must be true so it becomes sort of the tent pole.
[SPEAKER_02]: in the for the for the for the CIS assessments.
[SPEAKER_02]: So by the time Colin Powell the Secretary of State goes to the United Nations in February of 2003 and I'm sitting there in the Security Council on watching it and he says first thing
[SPEAKER_02]: George Tennant, the DCI, the director of Central Intelligence, is sitting right behind him and has never told him that they have never interviewed the eyewitness, the eyewitness being curveball, who has claimed that he has been supervising the supervising mobile lab, but for production of by-law.
[SPEAKER_01]: Can I ask one?
[SPEAKER_01]: Can I just ask one question here?
[SPEAKER_01]: before this, before the pal testimony, before it, yeah, oh, great deal of it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they agreed with the assessment.
[SPEAKER_05]: No.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
[SPEAKER_05]: the foreign aspect to Al Gore, to vice president Al Gore.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so everybody at that point believed that Saddam was contained.
[SPEAKER_05]: He's in the box, because Unscum, the U.N. is all over him.
[SPEAKER_05]: He can't really do anything.
[SPEAKER_05]: They're all over the country.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that was that was very true.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then
[SPEAKER_05]: because people are investigating what his claims are, and there's contradictions up the lawsuit.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, there's more caucus for a little more Jerry, who he was and what were the contradictions that started to emerge in his story?
[SPEAKER_01]: And who pointed them out?
[SPEAKER_05]: The information was being shared, and I was allowed by the agency to say this, but the information was not just shared with CIA and DIA from the German V&D, but the Germans were also sharing with the British SIS, Secret Intelligence Service MI6.
[SPEAKER_05]: So, of course, when any of us get this kind of information, we're going to go check it out.
[SPEAKER_05]: And then really, that's what the Germans wanted us to do.
[SPEAKER_05]: They were a smaller service, they're fairly limited, and what they can really vet, as far as the information and check out.
[SPEAKER_05]: But we have more resources and sort of the breads.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so they share it with us, asking us, please give us your evaluation of his information.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so that's what we just attempted to do is go check this out.
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, the birds were much more successful than we were.
[SPEAKER_05]: They, one of the people that, that, one of the Iraqi engineers that Kerbal implicated in a story was a guy named Dr. Basal Al-Sati.
[SPEAKER_05]: He was the head of the engineering center where Kerbal worked.
[SPEAKER_05]: And he had emigrated from Iraq.
[SPEAKER_05]: His son was living in the UK going, he was going to be he was pretty mad.
[SPEAKER_05]: And he was at Sheffield University, which is where his dad went to school.
[SPEAKER_05]: So the Brits, of course, immediately go to the Sun and because they're trying to get a contact with a dad, they're reading all this stuff about your dad was involved in this mobile VW plant project, and all, so they go to the kid and they ask him, he's this young guy.
[SPEAKER_05]: And Kerbal had implicated the Sun in this project.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the Brits see this young guy and they're thinking, wait a minute, this kid, this young guy is supposedly involved in some secret project by Saddam.
[SPEAKER_05]: So anyway, the kid they really say where's your dad?
[SPEAKER_05]: We want to talk to your dad.
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, well, they're thinking he's the dad is still on a rack and he says no, no, my dad sent him to buy Here you want us you want us phone number and is he mail here you go?
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, so so the Brits are thinking in a week a minute
[SPEAKER_05]: What, why is this, if this guy is so important to this top sugar project and Iraq, what's he doing to allow him to emigrate to divide?
[SPEAKER_05]: So they went, found him in Dubai and they talked to him.
[SPEAKER_05]: And Basel came out years ago on 60 minutes and told everything about this, how he then debriefed on all this.
[SPEAKER_05]: So that's where things started to go wrong, because Dr. Basel was a society who was codenamed Red River,
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's been on 60 minutes.
[SPEAKER_05]: That was just a British nickname that they gave them.
[SPEAKER_05]: So we could all talk all these different intelligence services to talk to each other.
[SPEAKER_05]: And we'd use these sort of nickdames.
[SPEAKER_05]: But the Brits were the ones who gave these names out to everybody.
[SPEAKER_05]: Anyway, so with both all sorts of things.
[SPEAKER_03]: But the Brits had never talked to Kurt Wall either.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, no.
[SPEAKER_05]: The Germans would have let any of us talk to him directly.
[SPEAKER_03]: And DIA, which is circulating these reports,
[SPEAKER_03]: talk to curveball either.
[SPEAKER_02]: No, right.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it was during this period of time, if I can't.
[SPEAKER_02]: So you asked if, if unskom, believe this.
[SPEAKER_02]: One of the missions that unskom did or multiple missions was to track, try and track down.
[SPEAKER_02]: Curveball originally had work as claimed he'd worked at a place called Jerf on the Dough, which is a big building.
[SPEAKER_02]: and CIA had imagery and and so on and his story was that the trucks came in and they had to make a dog leg here and it turned there something and there was a movable wall to get it out and they went to this site and they took ground readings and they took you know DNA tests and they radar images and you know and the wall was very solid there's no question there's no movable wall there's no secret button you could press to pull a book out and the wall opens everything
[SPEAKER_02]: And CIA responds, as I understand, it says, well, they built the wall before you came, you know, where the wall moves at night and they take it down in the morning or, you know, it's on a hit.
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, they came up with every kind of possible excuse to justify their own conclusion rather than acknowledge.
[SPEAKER_05]: took over in November of 2000 and I was a 2002 and got back into a rack before our 2003 March war and we gave them this information so that they could go and inspect a site and we could already see on imagery the wall that divided the site in half.
[SPEAKER_05]: Now,
[SPEAKER_05]: to answer Karen's questions.
[SPEAKER_05]: We started to see in 2000, we're looking at imagery of the Girph on the Doff, this agricultural site.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's now got a wall across it that was built 1997.
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, Kerbal said he didn't leave until 1999.
[SPEAKER_05]: So why didn't he report a wall dividing the site in half and his Bob pointed out the route he said that the mobile plants took and these are semi trucks with a flatbed trailer with equipment mounted on it
[SPEAKER_05]: they had to go through this wall at least twice so how do you go through a wall well they came up the imagery else came up with an answer
[SPEAKER_05]: They wrote on the on the satellite imagery, they annotated it with gate G-A-T-E with an arrow pointing at it at the wall at the places where the truck would close and I talked to these And the energy else later on years later and I said why did you do that and they said I said cripple never reported I gate because he never reported the wall and they said to me well how else would a truck get through the wall and I thought I
[SPEAKER_03]: you know you just miss let all the policy makers we do need to take a break we will be right back
[SPEAKER_03]: and we are back.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have to say one of the delicious items in Bob's piece about you, Jerry, is at the time curveball the most crucial intelligence asset being used to make the case for
[SPEAKER_03]: And also, by the way, did you ever go to the Burger King, Jerry?
[SPEAKER_05]: No, but I know where it is.
[SPEAKER_05]: But yeah, I mean, I tracked it down because I wanted to know.
[SPEAKER_05]: But he also did interviews with a press later on and talked about it.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the press from the Guardian, a couple of reporters, Helen Pitt, and I'm trying to remember the other gentleman's, they went there and actually talked to the co-workers who said,
[SPEAKER_05]: boast about how important he was back in Iraq and we all thought he was full of garbage.
[SPEAKER_05]: So let me explain how that happened.
[SPEAKER_05]: So you've got 2,000 he's reporting.
[SPEAKER_05]: His reporting sounded so sensational and incredible at the beginning and this is typical with fabricators.
[SPEAKER_05]: As you start to investigate their story, it starts to crumble and then you start to question
[SPEAKER_05]: their credibility and finally gets to a point where you're like we're done.
[SPEAKER_05]: You're just lying.
[SPEAKER_05]: We're done with you and you get rid of them.
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, you terminate your relationship with them.
[SPEAKER_05]: I got to be careful how I say things.
[SPEAKER_05]: This was too much into Hollywood movies.
[SPEAKER_05]: So what happened here is as we got into 2001 and his story is being checked out by the breads and other people,
[SPEAKER_05]: And he's thinking, my con is going to lose, you know, I'm going to lose my, my, the B&D is giving me a apartment, supporting me, giving a cell phone or getting paid, and this is all going to come to an end and I still don't have citizenship, which is why he did this in the first place.
[SPEAKER_05]: He was just trying to get citizenship.
[SPEAKER_05]: and he doesn't feel any guilt for lying, which is why he can implicate everybody including his friends, family, coworkers, anybody in his stories, and he'll stick to it to the end, and he doesn't carry, doesn't have empathy.
[SPEAKER_05]: It reminds me of someone else these days, but and this is a problem when you start to listen to pathological lives, if you do not figure them out, that they are lying to you,
[SPEAKER_05]: by looking at their information and starting to challenge them, they're going to keep on feeding you information.
[SPEAKER_05]: So as 2001 progress, he got to a point where in September, right before 9-11, that's just a coincidence happened there.
[SPEAKER_05]: But the analysts in the community, the analysts in B&D, CIA, DIA, and SIS,
[SPEAKER_05]: in love with this guy.
[SPEAKER_05]: They have just a nabbard with a source.
[SPEAKER_05]: They've never met.
[SPEAKER_03]: They've never met.
[SPEAKER_05]: They're reading his very polished reporting.
[SPEAKER_05]: And they're probably, I read it too.
[SPEAKER_05]: It sounded really, really plausible.
[SPEAKER_05]: But the, and the operations officers in all these different intelligence organizations, they have to deal with sources directly.
[SPEAKER_05]: When you deal with someone directly, you're not really impressed, you know, if they don't come off right away, as impressing you, you're going to start to question their credibility and so amless don't deal with sources directly normally.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so the animals had never met this guy, but the officers have and the German officers, officers, I'm talking about in the B&D.
[SPEAKER_05]: So they're dealing directly with Kerbal and he is a pain to deal with.
[SPEAKER_05]: He's demanding, he wants everything, he wants them to help them on to move his furniture form when they move him from apartments and he thought they were just his servants.
[SPEAKER_05]: The ops officers of German ops officers are getting tired of dealing with this.
[SPEAKER_05]: The analysts, the German analysts are still in love with this guy.
[SPEAKER_05]: So the ops officers finally get fed up and in September or at least September or 2001, they decide we're done with this guy and they terminate their planned ester relationship with them.
[SPEAKER_03]: That cuts off the B&D.
[SPEAKER_05]: So this is the B&D, this is the B&D.
[SPEAKER_03]: September of Wednesday, 2001.
[SPEAKER_05]: three days before night alone.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, yeah, as Bob mentioned, they cut his their ties with him.
[SPEAKER_05]: So he has no financial support.
[SPEAKER_05]: You know, he's got an apartment.
[SPEAKER_05]: He's got a paper work.
[SPEAKER_05]: He's got a paper is livelihood.
[SPEAKER_05]: So he has to go find a job.
[SPEAKER_05]: Now, when you're an immigrant in a country in Europe, you can only take the media labor jobs.
[SPEAKER_05]: They're not going to go replace someone, you know, a German
[SPEAKER_05]: and his engineering background wasn't very good anyway.
[SPEAKER_05]: So he got a job at Burger King.
[SPEAKER_05]: Now this is, right before 9-11, they terminate him.
[SPEAKER_05]: 9-11 happens.
[SPEAKER_05]: Look at the change in the environment in the US and all these other countries.
[SPEAKER_05]: When 9-11 happened, fear, I mean, it's just a fearful environment, a lot of fear mongering, you know, oh my God, the terrorists are coming to get us.
[SPEAKER_05]: So all of a sudden,
[SPEAKER_05]: The Bush administration saw that as an opportunity to not just take out bin Laden in Al-Qaeda, but to also go after Saddam.
[SPEAKER_05]: They had been wanting to do it for a long time.
[SPEAKER_05]: So they did use this as painting Saddam as an imminent threat for regime change.
[SPEAKER_05]: That was our policy.
[SPEAKER_05]: This gave them the opportunity.
[SPEAKER_05]: So as Bob pointed out, everything changed after 9-11.
[SPEAKER_05]: where Kerbal's reporting had been questioned and suspicious that it may be fabrication and terminated him.
[SPEAKER_05]: Now the sudden after 9-11, it's like the most important thing since it's less bread.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because you said earlier on, the CIA got it so wrong, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: But in a way, that's not really what your story is about because what made them all?
[SPEAKER_03]: They did get it wrong.
[SPEAKER_01]: they got wrong, but they they've got everything wrong and they relied on curveball, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: They do better that.
[SPEAKER_02]: I guess what I'm asking is wow a few people, a few people, yeah, or Matt, or suspect.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, because you intuition.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's like, yeah, because CIA, DIA, SISB and D, these are all big organizations made up of people.
[SPEAKER_05]: Some people believe something, some people inside don't.
[SPEAKER_05]: So when you talk about the CIA getting something right or wrong, you have to figure out who inside there with the ones who got it wrong and who got it right.
[SPEAKER_05]: So in this case with Kerbal,
[SPEAKER_05]: His reports are all suspicious to the operations officers, but the analysts never let go.
[SPEAKER_05]: They thought, nope, he's credible.
[SPEAKER_05]: So when 9-11 happens, the Bush administration wants the CIA to provide them with all the threat and information on Saddam that we have.
[SPEAKER_05]: And of course, here's per ball is reporting.
[SPEAKER_05]: And they're not so let's wait, wait, let me first one thing here because when so all of some of this information is reborn and it's considered credible by the analyst, not by the operations officers, the analysts, the analysts of the ones who are communicating with the policymakers.
[SPEAKER_05]: In those new finished intelligence reports, there is absolutely no mention that Kerbal has been terminated by the handling agency.
[SPEAKER_05]: None.
[SPEAKER_05]: The policymakers don't know
[SPEAKER_03]: And none of the contradictions are in the renewing.
[SPEAKER_03]: None of it is included in there, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: So what I think I find fascinating as an outsider and as a reporter is was trying to understand this process at the time.
[SPEAKER_02]: And what struck me about CIA at that point was how much it reminded me of high school, right, the fights between the analysts and the DO and the personalities of the
[SPEAKER_02]: And I just heard something yesterday.
[SPEAKER_02]: Jerry, you probably know this, but I did not know this before.
[SPEAKER_02]: So there's this famous note that the station chief in Berlin writes back and says, the Germans are getting nervous.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's no problems with this girl.
[SPEAKER_02]: And in his book, tenants says, I never got that note.
[SPEAKER_02]: And what I heard yesterday was because
[SPEAKER_02]: a certain individual at, at, at, at Langley was fighting with the, the station chief in Berlin and said, I'm not passing this thing on screw this guy because they've been in mortal enemies for years, like in high school and they just said, I'm screw it.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm, you know, so it was like all of that personality class.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I want to ask you about that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because there was some high drama in the, in the days and hours before Powell's speech at the UN where some people
[SPEAKER_03]: We're trying to warn higher-ups.
[SPEAKER_03]: You can't rely on this.
[SPEAKER_03]: How can't use this?
[SPEAKER_03]: Tyler Drumheller, who I think was in charge of European affairs, said that he was warned by the BND, that he was not reliable, and he alerted John McLaughlin, the deputy to George Tenet.
[SPEAKER_03]: McLaughlin says he didn't remember that happening.
[SPEAKER_03]: before Powell uses the curveball example is almost exhibit A in his speech to the U.S. And they were all on the operations side.
[SPEAKER_05]: And even the breadth, the British operations officers were trying to warn, watch out.
[SPEAKER_05]: This guy's information.
[SPEAKER_05]: Remember, in the WD commissioner report, there's a British senior operations officer who said, hey,
[SPEAKER_05]: agency, especially WinPAC, this guy, Kurt Ball, is exhibiting character-resist typical of the fabricator.
[SPEAKER_05]: And he fought with windpack over this and tried to get them to understand, look, we think we, the operations officers, think this guy is a fabricator.
[SPEAKER_05]: And you guys are running with this and not telling the policymakers any of the problems with this guy.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's what really my book is all about, is this battle between the two groups in each
[SPEAKER_05]: Some of it would get blocked and others it would flow, especially if it agreed with what the analysis was, this nom as a threat and imminent threat, he has WD.
[SPEAKER_05]: That kind of analysis
[SPEAKER_05]: flew through the process.
[SPEAKER_05]: But the ops officers kept getting stopped saying, wait a minute, there's problems with the source.
[SPEAKER_05]: His credibility is in serious question.
[SPEAKER_05]: So, so do you understand?
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm not just talking about CIA.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm talking about DIA, SIS, and B&D.
[SPEAKER_05]: We were all the same.
[SPEAKER_05]: Operations officers didn't like the guy.
[SPEAKER_05]: And let's love them.
[SPEAKER_03]: did, um, did curveball have any relationship or get any encouragement from ockman chalibi in the Iraqi National Congress?
[SPEAKER_05]: No, except none, just one thing.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's when, uh, Kerpo's older brother,
[SPEAKER_05]: We learned this when I went into a rack and invested in it.
[SPEAKER_05]: Kerbal's older brother Fatah worked for the INC.
[SPEAKER_05]: He was the, yes, that's our relationship in 2000 in 2001.
[SPEAKER_05]: In summer of 2001, the older brother Fatah called Kerbal in Germany and said, hey, how are you doing?
[SPEAKER_05]: Nice to talk to you again, my brother and all that, my younger brother.
[SPEAKER_05]: Hey, do you have any information on a rack WMD?
[SPEAKER_05]: Do you know of any product you were an engineer there?
[SPEAKER_05]: Do you know anything that's happening in a rack and Carval said no, no, I don't I don't have anything.
[SPEAKER_05]: I just worked on some agricultural products projects which was true like you remember where it's all
[SPEAKER_02]: Mike, do you remember where Chalabi was on January 28th, 2002?
[SPEAKER_02]: He was sitting in 2002, 2003.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it was 2003.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's interesting because I am reliably informed that Chalabi privately took credit for curveball.
[SPEAKER_03]: He did that.
[SPEAKER_05]: He didn't know anything about it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And we even, but if the brother was working for the I.N.
[SPEAKER_03]: So where in London or where was the brother?
[SPEAKER_03]: Brother was in Turkey.
[SPEAKER_03]: So you don't think that this was ever communicated up the chain?
[SPEAKER_05]: No, we searched for any information to either confirm that or refute that the I.N.C.
[SPEAKER_05]: was behind this.
[SPEAKER_05]: But no, the brother, the brother was told, the older brother was told by Kerval.
[SPEAKER_05]: No, I don't have anything.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's what he passed back to Chalabi.
[SPEAKER_05]: Chalabi, you also came out publicly and said, I don't know who this guy is.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's supposed to work for me because Fatal, the older brother,
[SPEAKER_06]: I have looked.
[SPEAKER_05]: I went to wealth that his people were going to be dead in the fire after the fact when we talked to the brother that very before we found all this out that he had made this phone call and everything the Germans never knew any this
[SPEAKER_05]: But we found it out because we talked to the brother.
[SPEAKER_05]: So when that came out and we investigated because we knew the analysts were going to lock onto this and say, oh, see we weren't, we weren't just dumb believing this stuff.
[SPEAKER_05]: We weren't just misled.
[SPEAKER_05]: The I and C had this sophisticated, um,
[SPEAKER_05]: project to fool us.
[SPEAKER_05]: And so we wanted to kill that right away.
[SPEAKER_05]: So we investigated that whole thing and wrote back, no, no, no, I and C didn't know anything about this.
[SPEAKER_05]: The only thing they did was question the brother one time.
[SPEAKER_03]: Isn't it possible that that phone call from the brother who worked
[SPEAKER_05]: uh... curve ball to make up his tall tales no because his bob nose he already made up that story this remember the brother said he told but you said he told the brother he knew nothing yes in 2001 but when did right bob winded curve ball start reporting January February of 2000 so he already came up with his story when he was in Germany because his bob nose
[SPEAKER_05]: and start talking to the other refugees about I want to get German citizenship and have them give me and see I have an Iraqi passport they're going to give me all this stuff and the other emigries said hey look this is a very long process it's going to take you five ten years to ever get there if you ever do
[SPEAKER_05]: So curve ball decided I got to come up with a story because the emigrace told them also however if you're important to the B&D they'll get you a free ride through this process much faster than the regular emigrace system.
[SPEAKER_05]: So that told curve ball I got to come up with a story that's going to they're going to latch on to so then I'm valuable to them and they'll put me through the process faster which is exactly what happened.
[SPEAKER_03]: All right, so you've now written this massive book deconstructing all that went down.
[SPEAKER_03]: Can I have to say it here?
[SPEAKER_05]: It's a little earlier.
[SPEAKER_05]: You call it a massive book.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's 850 pages, but that's things that qualifies.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes, but that's, again, that's what I submitted to the agency.
[SPEAKER_05]: The agency is trying to redact, they're actually trying to redact all of it.
[SPEAKER_05]: But they're going to try and redact as much as they can.
[SPEAKER_05]: If they redact hundreds of pages, what do I have left?
[SPEAKER_05]: So I gave them 850 pages that I don't intend to publish, but I want to get what I can through the process, so that I do have enough for a book to be published.
[SPEAKER_03]: But they, but one of the things they are saying is classified is the identity of curveball, Rafael Eugenabi.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the guy's been on 60 minutes.
[SPEAKER_03]: He has been publicly out there for years.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, look, I'm not looking for all places to they have for.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm not looking for a fight with CIA.
[SPEAKER_05]: To me, this is absurd.
[SPEAKER_05]: You're suing them.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes, I realize that.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I mean, that's kind of a fight.
[SPEAKER_05]: But before that, even before I even filed the lawsuit, I thought this is absurd that we Courpol, if you go look on the internet, you can find everything you want about this guy, and then he was the source.
[SPEAKER_05]: So when I before I submitted my book, I submitted FOIA's Freedom of Information Act for about 120 documents from CIA and CIA.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's everything I investigated.
[SPEAKER_05]: I proved it was all false.
[SPEAKER_05]: why is it still classified after 25 years?
[SPEAKER_05]: It was classified 25 years ago.
[SPEAKER_05]: That should have been good.
[SPEAKER_01]: How long ago did you submit the manuscript to them for me?
[SPEAKER_05]: That was it to be in January of 2025.
[SPEAKER_05]: I submitted it for you as before that in 2024.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I was told it's going to take two and a half years before they even get to start the process of FOIAs.
[SPEAKER_05]: So when I submitted my manuscript, the CIA came back and said, well, until your FOIAs clear, we're not going to review your book.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's why that marks on five of the lawsuit is because they're obligated to review the book.
[SPEAKER_05]: But they are saying, not until your FOIAs are gone or gone through there,
[SPEAKER_05]: then what will we even touch this so what they've come back and said is well work will start reviewing your book but we're probably going to redact everything in fire tire book they they they put that in writing yes or yes really yes so their lawyer has said their lawyer said that sorry Bob he didn't get it
[SPEAKER_02]: I really hope you get you succeed in getting these foias through.
[SPEAKER_02]: I look forward to reading the original reports and find out what exactly.
[SPEAKER_02]: And that's important for my book.
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm whether it was did along the way or amped up at what or how it changed over time.
[SPEAKER_02]: Because with 90 of them, obviously that story must have moved in different ways.
[SPEAKER_02]: And I would really love it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, because I want to go that.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's why one of the reporting release is because
[SPEAKER_05]: You can read these reports, because that's what we investigated, every claim he made in those reports is what we chased down.
[SPEAKER_05]: And that's why the story is such a fascinating story, is how we did that.
[SPEAKER_05]: And it's also distressing about how we were instructed from doing that, because we became kind of the skunk at the garden party.
[SPEAKER_05]: When we investigated this on the ground in Iraq, we made everybody mad.
[SPEAKER_05]: CIA, DIA, S.I.S.
[SPEAKER_05]: and B.N.D.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes, but does everybody got mad at us?
[SPEAKER_05]: Did you ever meet Kerfall?
[SPEAKER_05]: No, no.
[SPEAKER_05]: I have not met him.
[SPEAKER_05]: Others that I work with have met him.
[SPEAKER_05]: And uh, yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: About that doctor who went was sent to, um, uh, evaluate him and, uh, Lassuk said that, uh, he was, he had liquor on his breath early in the morning.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, he, yeah, he's been out drinking.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, so I didn't meet him, but I went to his family's house.
[SPEAKER_05]: I went when I got to a rack as I There's Bob and I've just got so I went to a rack I was there in June, but of 2003 I went back in September because I had to come back to see I had course to get access to all the information that had been with help from me I can't investigate him if I can't have access to all this information I was still never ready into the program But I got a hold of the files from my colleagues who were the lead analysts on that
[SPEAKER_05]: hit everything in there.
[SPEAKER_05]: And of course, in there is all of the things that went bad on purple, all the derogatory information.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I used that when it went back in September.
[SPEAKER_05]: And I got back in September on, I mean, I got back in Iraq on September 3rd of 2003.
[SPEAKER_05]: We went to see his immediate supervisor at the engineering center on September 5th.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the guy told us, oh, that guy
[SPEAKER_05]: Well, he walked away from his job at the engineering center.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's a very little final few days of 1994.
[SPEAKER_05]: And we had no choice but to terminate his employment on the first few days, 1995.
[SPEAKER_05]: When he told us that, we knew right then this is all a fabrication, all of it.
[SPEAKER_05]: Because everything from all reported was after 1994.
[SPEAKER_03]: So to wrap up here, a question for both of you, what lessons?
[SPEAKER_03]: should we take from this rather amazing story of a fabricator whose claims get used as a basis for going to war.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay, I'm very glad you're asking that question because the point of my book is not to embarrass people over mistakes that were made.
[SPEAKER_05]: I made mistakes.
[SPEAKER_05]: Hello, I thought there was WMD
[SPEAKER_05]: and I believed in Kerbal, it wasn't until I started to learn about him after the war and investigate him, that I realized all of this fell apart, the result of fabrication.
[SPEAKER_05]: So the point of my book is to help
[SPEAKER_05]: people learn what happened and why it happened.
[SPEAKER_05]: That analysts became biased toward that judgment.
[SPEAKER_05]: They weren't stupid.
[SPEAKER_05]: The analysts just became biased toward the judgment.
[SPEAKER_05]: This adom has dubbed him Dave before the war.
[SPEAKER_05]: It wasn't until we got into a rack that we learned that was wrong.
[SPEAKER_05]: So I'm hoping this helps people, the general public, to understand how we got into this war with the most significant source.
[SPEAKER_05]: and how it all went wrong, but also I wrote this for my colleagues in the intelligence community, not just in the US, but the foreign countries are allied partners as well, so that they can learn, watch out if this happens to you, watch for these signals, these signatures that are happening to start going, well, wait a minute, we got this great source, but maybe we should look at this source a lot closer before we start using with the policymakers.
[SPEAKER_03]: Bob, I want to come to you on the lessons from all this.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I got one last question for Jerry.
[SPEAKER_03]: In the year sense, we have learned that Saddam deliberately wanted us and the rest of the world to believe that he had WMD, because he thought that would be a deterrence for the Iranians
[SPEAKER_03]: And I just wonder because that's not an argument or a thought that I ever recall being expressed in the run-up to the Iraq War.
[SPEAKER_03]: And we have this giant intelligence community with all these analysts.
[SPEAKER_03]: Did anybody ever consider the idea that maybe Saddam was bluffing?
[SPEAKER_05]: First let me start off by I disagree with that.
[SPEAKER_05]: Saddam was trying to get out from U.N. sanctions.
[SPEAKER_05]: I challenge anybody to show me where he actually said and gave this impression he has WMD.
[SPEAKER_05]: It doesn't make sense.
[SPEAKER_05]: Saddam is trying to get out from under sanctions with the U.N.
[SPEAKER_05]: going around looking for any evidence that he still has WMD.
[SPEAKER_05]: Saddam even threatened his scientists with death.
[SPEAKER_05]: If unskomp found anything, he didn't want anything retained.
[SPEAKER_05]: He wanted all destroyed and gone.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because every time unskomp, we're been, why not come clean?
[SPEAKER_03]: Let the inspectors in, show that the yet nothing and put the whole thing to rest.
[SPEAKER_05]: He did.
[SPEAKER_05]: And what did we come away with?
[SPEAKER_05]: Everybody came back, the unscommon spectators came back and said, we can't find anything, we can't find no evidence that he has reconstituted his program.
[SPEAKER_05]: But the intelligence analysts are all out there and the politicians and all these different countries, especially the US, are saying no, Saddam has reconstituted.
[SPEAKER_05]: Based on what, nobody had any evidence except some fabricators who were giving us this stuff.
[SPEAKER_02]: Mike, I'm going to support the career on this one, Mike memory, it's in the sense that the debriefs of Saddam, it became clear that he thought, he thought we were smarter than before.
[SPEAKER_02]: He thought that we understood that this was all aimed not at the U.S., but at about the loving Iran.
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, and that as Jerry said, the inspectors were all over the country, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: I remember talking to a guy who was on missile inspectors and he was, they were sent to someplace.
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh my god, you should see these long things they're holding and they were chicken shacks, you know, chicken and chicken.
[SPEAKER_02]: Chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken, and chicken,
[SPEAKER_05]: They went to, because they went to Kermal sites that he said there was a secret laboratory buried under this hidden under a chicken coop and they went there and there was no hidden site.
[SPEAKER_05]: So they got the t-shirts that said, you know, a ballistic chicken inspector and.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so I actually I agree with him.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think that we that the and it's and it wasn't just C. I, as you remember, my most the media, everything, everything tank in Washington, you know, Congress fell for it.
[SPEAKER_02]: Hook on and sinker and it was pretty much happening elsewhere in London and Berlin and Paris.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I'm not in the streets, but in in
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
[SPEAKER_02]: And if you go look to this and why do they need that?
[SPEAKER_05]: And because they didn't look at the inspectors have said right before the war on Movic inspectors are saying we are finding nothing.
[SPEAKER_05]: No loom tubes.
[SPEAKER_05]: No uranium from Africa.
[SPEAKER_05]: No UAVs carrying that said to the war.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's all on the record they have come out said is not there and so so what really instructive things is if I remember so I was there the night that the day that Powell spoke and he gives this incredibly I was convinced.
[SPEAKER_02]: persuasive presentation and the Iraqi Minister at the UN, the Secretary or Ambassador at the UN, issues a lengthy statement afterwards that I remember looking, you know, throw it away as useless.
[SPEAKER_02]: It means nothing.
[SPEAKER_02]: If you look at it after what we know, it was absolutely dead off, correct.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was absolutely more correct than anything else at that day.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Let me get to your lesson.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're running out of time.
[SPEAKER_02]: There are two lessons that I take from this.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_02]: One of them is that after 9-11, the take was, we failed to connect the dots.
[SPEAKER_02]: In Iraq, they made up the dots.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the problem.
[SPEAKER_02]: Is they took a very disparate kinds of things and they pieced it together because there was no access.
[SPEAKER_02]: It was a denied site after the 1998 after the bombing and they just sort of filled in the holes with these, these elaborate
[SPEAKER_02]: That was number one.
[SPEAKER_02]: The number two thing is for the intelligence community as whatever the host, if you want it bad, you get it bad, right?
[SPEAKER_02]: They really wanted to find something.
[SPEAKER_02]: They put the word out and every dirt bag out there came in with the story.
[SPEAKER_02]: Chalope was the biggest one, but you know, that's what they got.
[SPEAKER_03]: One follow-up to the lessons learned question is how
[SPEAKER_03]: does this apply to our current war in the Middle East against Iran?
[SPEAKER_02]: So I think here's a real key similarity, which is that in during the Iraq war, before the Iraq war, the inspectors were kicked out because the Clinton bombed Iraq, right, in 1998, the inspectors had kicked out.
[SPEAKER_02]: And CIA goes blind, everybody goes blind, it's a denied space.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so they make
[SPEAKER_02]: In the case of Iran, Trump rips up, there's an effective, there's a working agreement, the JPCOA that the Obama administration signed in 2015 to limit Iran's nuclear program to ship out all the enriched uranium or 98% of it and have IA inspectors and cameras and so on.
[SPEAKER_02]: Trump, for whatever his reasons, decides to rip it up in 2018, the inspectors are still allowed to go for while Trump then bombs them.
[SPEAKER_02]: So now, and during that, over this last period of time between 2018, now Iran decides the hell with it, as long as we don't have the Americans going out, we don't have this agreement.
[SPEAKER_02]: So they go, they have now 1,000 pounds of, in Uranium, it used to be a 10% in Richmond, now it's a 60%.
[SPEAKER_02]: As far as we know, despite Trump's claims that it was obliterated, it's all still there.
[SPEAKER_02]: So it was, in both cases, you know, areas on our side that led to the disastrous, disastrous political decisions that led to war.
[SPEAKER_05]: During, right, right, I mean, look at, look at the similarities between Iraq and Iran, you know, your same buzzwords of being used by the administration,
[SPEAKER_05]: I mean, this is a rack 2.0.
[SPEAKER_05]: We're doing this again.
[SPEAKER_05]: And we don't know really, I don't, I'm not current on what the agency knows in Iran, but IAEA of course has confirmed they do have some in Rich uranium.
[SPEAKER_05]: But, you know, when you have a second half of your weapons program, you've got to create a device to be able to use this.
[SPEAKER_05]: We don't know, does anybody
[SPEAKER_05]: So ballistic missiles may be yes, but you have to have a warhead and you have to have a device in that warhead that it there's a nuclear device and and you have to get from the Eurasia radium and a gas into a metal form to form you either a gun assembly device or or an explosion device
[SPEAKER_05]: We don't know anything about that.
[SPEAKER_02]: So all we need is we don't know something about it, but but the estimates are, you know, eight months to a year away.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's been eight months to a year away.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's been eight months to a year away since 2003.
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, I'm concerned.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm concerned we've gone down the same road again and the American public has been misled with the same buzzwords we used on a rack.
[SPEAKER_03]: Excellent point.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, just to wrap up here, Jerry.
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to thank you and Bob for joining us and I look forward to your book finally clearing all these bureaucratic hurdles.
[SPEAKER_03]: So when it comes out, I can put it next to Bob's book on the curve wall shelf of my.
[SPEAKER_03]: My library.
[SPEAKER_04]: All right.
[SPEAKER_04]: Sounds good.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thanks a lot.
[SPEAKER_04]: Bye guys.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's it for this week's Biotalk.
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[SPEAKER_00]: I'm Jeff Stein.
[SPEAKER_00]: Am I going to go to the golf?
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