HOME
DV NEWS
SERVICE ARCHIVE SUBMISSIONS/CONTACT ABOUT DV
Ex-CIA
Professionals:
Weapons
of Mass Distraction: Where? Find? Plant?
by
David MacMichael and Ray McGovern
April
26, 2003
FROM:
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
SUBJECT:
The Stakes in the Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction
The
Bush administration’s refusal to allow UN inspectors to join the hunt for
weapons of mass destruction in US-occupied Iraq has elicited high interest in
foreign news media. The most widely accepted interpretation is that the US is
well aware that evidence regarding the existence and location of such weapons
is “shaky” (the adjective now favored by UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix),
and that the last thing the Pentagon wants is to have Blix’ inspectors looking
over the shoulders of US forces as they continue their daunting quest.
Administration
leaders will not soon forgive Blix or Mohamed ElBaradei, Director General of
the International Atomic Energy Agency, for exposing to ridicule the two main
pieces of “evidence” adduced by Washington late last year to support its
contention that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons development program:
(1) the forged documents purporting to show that Iraq was trying to obtain
uranium from Niger, and (2) the high strength aluminum rods sought by Iraq that
the US insisted were to be used in a nuclear application. That contention was
roundly debunked not only by IAEA scientists but also by the international
engineering community.
The
normally taciturn Blix now finds it “conspicuous” that a month after the
invasion of Iraq, the US search for weapons of mass destruction had turned up
nothing. He expressed eagerness to send UN inspectors back into Iraq, but also
served notice that he would not allow them to be led “like dogs on a leash” by
US forces there.
The
media have raised the possibility that the US might “plant” weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq, and that this may be another reason to keep UN inspectors
out. This is a charge of such seriousness that we Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity have been conducting an informal colloquium on the
issue. As one might expect, there is no unanimity among us on the likelihood of
such planting, but most believe that Washington would consider it far too
risky. Those holding this view add that recent polls suggest most Americans
will not be very critical of the Bush administration even if no weapons of mass
destruction are found.
Others,
taken aback by the in the in-your-face attitude with which Secretary of State
Colin Powell reacted both to the exposure of the Niger forgery and to the
requiem for the argument from aluminum rods, see in that attitude a sign that
the Bush administration would not necessarily let the risk of disclosure deter
it from planting weapons. They also point to the predicament facing the Blair
government in Great Britain and other coalition partners, if no such weapons
are found in Iraq. They note that the press in the UK has been more independent
and vigilant than its US counterpart, and thus the British people are generally
better informed and more skeptical of their government than US citizens tend to
be.
While
the odds of such planting seem less than even, speculation on the possibility
drove us down memory lane. Likely or not in present circumstances, there is
ample precedent for such covert action operations. VIPS member David MacMichael
authored this short case-study paper to throw light on this little known subject.
What leaps out of his review is a reminder that, were the Bush administration
to decide in favor of a planting or similar operation, it would not have to
start from scratch as far as experience is concerned. Moreover, many of the
historical examples that follow bear an uncanny resemblance to factors and
circumstances in play today.
*
* *
1.
Faked evidence was a hallmark of post-World War II US covert operations in
Latin America. In 1954, for example, it was instrumental in overthrowing the
Arbenz government in Guatemala. Arbenz, who was suspected of having Communist
leanings, had tried to make the United Fruit Company comply with Guatemalan
law. At President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s direction, the CIA organized and armed
a force of malcontent Guatemalans living in Nicaragua to invade their home
country.
The
invasion was explained and “justified” when a cache of Soviet-made weapons
planted by the CIA was “discovered” on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast. Washington
alleged that the weapons were intended to support an attempt by Arbenz to
overthrow the Nicaraguan government.
2.
One of the more egregious and embarrassing uses of fake material evidence
occurred on the eve of the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, when Alabama National
Guard B-26 bombers attacked a Cuban Air Force base in Havana. When Cuba’s UN
ambassador protested, US Ambassador Adlai Stevenson (himself misinformed by the
White House) insisted that the attacking planes were those of defecting Cuban
Air Force pilots.
Two
of the aircraft were shot down in Cuba, however, and others were forced to land
in Miami where they could be examined. When it became clear that the planes
were not Cuban, Washington’s hand was shown and Stevenson was in high dudgeon.
Legends,
however, seem to die more slowly than dudgeon. The US government clung
unconscionably long to “plausible denial” regarding the B-26s. Four Alabama
National Guardsmen had been killed in the incident and Cuba kept trying to get
the US to accept their bodies. Not until 1978 did Washington agree to receive
the remains and give them to the families of the deceased.
3.
The war in Vietnam is replete with examples of fabrication and/or
misrepresentation of intelligence to justify US government policies and
actions. The best-known case, of course, is the infamous Tonkin Gulf
incident—the one that did not happen but was used by President Lyndon Johnson
to strong-arm Congress into giving him carte blanche for the war. Adding insult
to injury, CIA current intelligence analysts were forbidden to report accurately
on what had happened (and not happened) in the Tonkin Gulf in their daily
publication the next morning, on grounds that the President had already decided
to use the non-incident to justify launching the air war that very day. The
analysts were aghast when their seniors explained that they had decided that
they did not want to “wear out their welcome at the White House.”
More
directly relevant to the current search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
is the following incident, which was related to the author at the time by one
of the main participants. US officials running the war in Vietnam believed that
North Vietnamese Communist troops operating in South Vietnam were supported by
large, secret supply dumps across the border in Cambodia. In 1968, the US
military in Saigon drew up plans to raid one of those suspected supply bases.
The
colonel in charge of logistics for the raid surprised other members of the
raiding party by loading up large amounts of North Vietnamese uniforms,
weapons, communications equipment, and so forth. He clearly had supplementary
orders. He explained to the members of his team that, since it would be
necessary to discover North Vietnamese supplies to justify the incursion into
neutral Cambodia, it behooved them to be prepared to carry some back.
4.
With William Casey at the helm of the CIA during the Reagan presidency, the
planting of evidence to demonstrate that opponents of governments in Central
America were sponsored by the USSR reached new heights—or depths. The following
are representative examples:
(a)
In January 1981 four dugout canoes were “discovered” on a Salvadoran beach. The
US claimed that the boats had carried 100 armed Sandinista guerrillas from
Nicaragua to support leftist insurgents in El Salvador. Neither weapons nor
Nicaraguans traceable to the boats were ever found, but Washington drew
attention to the fact that the wood from which the boats were made was not
native to El Salvador.
This
kind of “proof” might at first seem laughable but this was no trivial matter.
The Reagan administration successfully used the incident to justify lifting the
embargo on US arms to El Salvador that President Carter had imposed after
members of the Salvadoran National Guard raped and murdered three US nuns and their
lay assistant. The names of those four women now sit atop a long list of
Americans and Salvadorans subsequently murdered by US weapons in the hands of
the National Guard in El Salvador.
(b)
In February 1981, the State Department issued a sensational “White Paper” based
on alleged Salvadoran rebel documents. Authored by a young, eager-to-please
Foreign Service officer named John Glassman, the paper depicted damning links
between the insurgents, Nicaragua, Cuba, and the Soviet Union. A smoking gun.
Unfortunately
for Glassman and the Reagan administration, Wall Street Journal reporter
Jonathan Kwitny got access to the same documents and found little resemblance
to what was contained in Glassman’s paper. Glassman admitted to Kwitny that he
had made up quotes and guessed at figures for the Soviet weapons supposedly
coming to the Salvadoran insurgents.
(c)
Certainly among the most extraordinary attempts to plant evidence was the Barry
Seal affair—a complicated operation designed to incriminate the Nicaraguan
Sandinista government for international drug trafficking. The operation began
in 1982, when CIA Director Casey created the position of National Intelligence
Officer for Narcotics. Casey’s handpicked NIO wasted no time telling
representatives of other agencies that high priority was to be given to finding
evidence linking both Castro and the Sandinistas to the burgeoning cocaine
trade.
Coast
Guard and Drug Enforcement Agency officers protested that this might be
counterproductive since Cuba was the most cooperative government in the
Caribbean in the fight against drugs and there was no evidence showing that the
Nicaraguan government played any significant role. Never mind, said the NIO,
the task was to put black hats on our enemies.
In
1986 Barry Seal, a former TWA pilot who had trained Nicaraguan Contra pilots in
the early eighties, was facing a long sentence after a federal drug conviction
in Florida. Seal made his way to the White House’s National Security Council to
make the following proposition to officials there. He would fly his own plane
to Colombia and take delivery of cocaine. He would then make an “emergency
landing” in Nicaragua and make it appear that Sandinista officials were aiding
him in drug trafficking.
Seal
made it clear that he would expect help with his legal problems.
The
Reagan White House jumped at the offer. Seal’s plane was flown to
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where it was fitted with secret cameras to
enable Seal to photograph Nicaraguan officials in the act of assisting him with
the boxes of cocaine.
The
operation went as planned. Seal flew to Colombia and then to Nicaragua where he
landed at a commercial airfield. There he was met by a Nicaraguan named Federico
Vaughan, who helped with the offloading and reloading of boxes of cocaine and
was duly photographed—not very well, it turned out, because the special cameras
malfunctioned. Though blurred and grainy, the photos were delivered to the
White House, and a triumphant Ronald Reagan went on national TV to show that
the Sandinistas were not only Communists but also criminals intent on addicting
America’s youth. What more justification was needed for the Contra war against
the Sandinistas!
Again,
the Wall Street Journal’s Jonathan Kwitny played the role of skunk at the
picnic, pointing out substantial flaws in the concocted story. Vaughan, who
according to the script was an assistant to Nicaraguan Interior Minister Tomas
Borge, was shown not to be what he claimed. Indeed, congressional investigators
found that the telephone number called by Seal to contact Vaughn belonged to
the US embassy in Managua.
It
was yet another fiasco, and Seal paid for it with his life. His Colombian drug
suppliers were not amused when the Reagan administration identified him
publicly as a US undercover agent. As he awaited trial on other narcotics
charges in Louisiana, Seal was ambushed and killed by four gunmen who left his
body riddled with 140 bullets.
5.
Fabricated evidence also played an important role in the first President Bush’s
attempt to secure congressional and UN approval for the 1991 Gulf War.
(a)
Few will forget the heart-rending testimony before a congressional committee by
the sobbing 15 year-old Kuwaiti girl called Nayirah on October 10, 1990:
“I
saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room
where 15 babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators,
took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die.”
No
congressperson, no journalist took the trouble to probe the identity of
“Nayirah,” who was said to be an escapee from Kuwait but was later revealed to
be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington. With consummate skill,
the story had been manufactured out of whole cloth and the 15 year-old coached
by the PR firm Hill & Knowlton, which has a rich history of being
“imbedded” in Republican administrations. Similar unsubstantiated yarns made
their debut several weeks later at the UN, where a team of seven “witnesses,”
also coached by Hill & Knowlton, testified about atrocities in Iraq. (It
was later learned that the seven had used false names.) And in an unprecedented
move, the UN Security Council allowed the US to show a video created by Hill
& Knowlton.
All
to good effect. The PR campaign had the desired impact, and Congress voted to
authorize the use of force against Iraq on January 12, 1991. (The UN did so on November
29, 1990.) “Nayirah’s” true identity did not become known until two years
later. And Hill & Knowlton’s coffers bulged when the proceeds arrived from
its billing of Kuwait.
Interestingly,
the General Manager of Hill & Knowlton’s Washington, DC office at the time
was a woman named Victoria Clarke. She turned out to be less successful in her
next job, as Press Secretary for the re-election campaign of President George
Bush in 1992. But she is now back in her element as Assistant Secretary of
Defense for Public Affairs.
(b)
There was a corollary fabrication that proved equally effective in garnering
support in Congress for the war resolution in 1991. The White House claimed
there were satellite photos showing Iraqi tanks and troops massing on the borders
of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, threatening to invade Saudi Arabia. This fueled the
campaign for war and frightened the Saudis into agreeing to cooperate fully
with US military forces.
On
September 11, 1990, President George H. W. Bush, addressing a joint session of
Congress, claimed “120,000 Iraqi troops with 850 tanks have poured into Kuwait
and moved south to threaten Saudi Arabia.” But an enterprising journalist, Jean
Heller, reported in the St. Petersburg Times on January 6, 1991 (a bare ten
days before the Gulf War began) that commercial satellite photos taken on
September 11, the day the president spoke, showed no sign of a massive buildup
of Iraqi forces in Kuwait. When the Pentagon was asked to provide evidence to
support the president’s claim, it refused to do so—and continues to refuse to
this day.
Interestingly,
the national media in the US chose to ignore Heller’s story. Heller’s
explanation:
“I
think part of the reason the story was ignored was that it was published too
close to the start of the war. Second, and more importantly, I do not think
that people wanted to hear that we might have been deceived. A lot of the
reporters who have seen the story think it is dynamite, but the editors seem to
have the attitude, ‘At this point, who cares?’”
Does
some of this have a familiar ring?
/s/
Richard Beske, San
Diego
Kathleen McGrath
Christison, Santa Fe
William Christison,
Santa Fe
Patrick Eddington,
Alexandria, VA
Raymond McGovern,
Arlington, VA
Steering Group
Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) is a coast-to-coast enterprise;
mostly intelligence officers from analysis side of CIA. Ray McGovern (rmcgovern@slschool.org) worked as a
CIA analyst for 27 years. He co-authored this article with David MacMichael.