|
nobody else
not even YOU!
here's a snip from the review of Risen's book, State of War. Really sickening stuff:
The CIA's position on Iraq was clear -- it knew almost nothing. "It is hard for people outside the agency to understand how little we were thinking on Iraq," one official tells Risen. But just before the war began, some at the agency tried to fix this problem. Charlie Allen, a CIA veteran who was highly regarded in the agency, launched a provocative program to persuade the expatriate family members of Iraqi weapons scientists to travel to Iraq and investigate the country's plans regarding weapons of mass destruction. Risen tells the story of one such ad hoc spy, Sawsan Alhaddad, an Iraqi-born doctor who had defected from her native country in 1979 and is now an American citizen living in Cleveland. The CIA contacted Alhaddad in May 2002 and asked her to do something straight out of a Tom Clancy novel: The agency wanted her to go to Baghdad and secretly interrogate her brother, Saad Tawfiq, a key Iraqi nuclear scientist, about Iraq's nuclear program.
Alhaddad agreed, and her story makes for the most thrilling reading in Risen's book. She prepares zealously for her assignment, learning ways to avoid detection by Saddam's men, and writing mnemonic aids into a crossword puzzle to help her memorize the questions to ask her brother. Once she's in Iraq, a cloak-and-dagger scene unfolds as she tries to speak candidly with her brother about his work without raising any suspicions. But for all the theatrics -- to talk secretly, the siblings take long walks late at night, they unplug the phones and they turn up the television in Tawfiq's house -- Tawfiq repeatedly tells Alhaddad the same thing: There is no nuclear program in Iraq. Risen paraphrases what Tawfiq said to his sister: "We don't have the resources to make anything anymore, he told her. We don't even have enough spare parts for our conventional military. We can't even shoot down an airplane. We don't have anything left. If the sanctions are ever lifted, then Saddam is certain to restart the programs. But there is nothing now."
Tawfiq, who was understandably wary of war, thought that by taking a risk to tell his sister the truth about Iraq's weapons, he was clearing up an American misunderstanding about Saddam's regime and possibly helping to stave off the invasion. He was not alone; in all, Allen's program recruited family members to get to about 30 Iraqi weapons scientists in the months before the war, and they all said the same thing, "that Iraq's programs to develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons had long since been abandoned," Risen writes.
This data would, of course, later prove highly accurate -- but Risen says that officials in the CIA's Directorate of Operations, the agency's clandestine program, became jealous of Allen's findings, and under Tenet's weak management, they successfully suppressed the new information on Iraq. "The reports from the family members of Iraqi scientists were buried in the bowels of the CIA and were never released for distribution to the State Department, Pentagon, or White House," Risen writes. "President Bush never heard about the visits or the interviews."
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
