I was thinking… how is it that the Yanks and the Brits believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction when he didn’t ?
What went so catastrophically wrong that they invaded and occupied a Middle East country on a false premise ?
The only conclusion I can come to is: they were duped.
Saddam wanted them to think he had a WMD programme and he set about convincing them. It’ll probably go down as one of the best counter-intelligence operations of all time. Make them think something that isn’t true, and play it to your advantage.
Since Gulf War I, Saddam knew the Americans would get him if they ever got the chance. His best insurance against this was weapons of mass destruction.
North Korea proves that WMD are the one thing that makes a belligerent US administration think twice. They won’t pile in with the 101st Airborne Division if they believe you’ve got rockets full of nastys ! They’ll hold fire and negotiate.
The UN weapons inspectors put paid to any serious Iraqi chemical, biological or nuclear ambitions. It would have taken Saddam years to build up a WMD programme that he could actually use. So he turned to the next best thing. The appearance of a weapons of mass destruction programme. It was a risky bluff and a canny way for Saddam to prevent Gulf War II. Trouble is, his deception was too successful. The Americans and British fell for it so spectacularly that they genuinely believed he had WMD and was a major threat to world peace. So they invaded.
Britain and America failed to spot that Saddam was bluffing. The US believed the counter-intelligence deception they were fed. Iraqi counter-intelligence operations were run out of Directorate 5 of the Special Bureau of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, the Jihaz al-Mukhabarat al-Amma or Mukhabarat. Whoever ran this operation must have been a genius.
So, how did they do it ?
The Iraqis would first need to have identified their enemy. Who did they need to deceive ? Then, what are their weaknesses and how can they be exploited. It’s classic Sun Tzu, “…the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak.“
So from Saddam’s point of view, where were the Americans weakest ?
Their vulnerabilities were in 3 main areas:
1. American over reliance on espionage technology. They would rather eavesdrop from 3000 miles than put an ear to a keyhole. They had no spies on the ground. They lacked vital ‘humint’. The CIA were relying on fancy gadgetry, spy satellites and Echelon listening systems to find out what the Iraqis were up to. Saddam therefore knew where to target his deception. He knew where they were listening and watching. All he had to do was seed the right deceptive messages in the right place.
2. Rivalries and power struggles within the US government. The State Department, Pentagon and CIA were engaged in bureaucratic rivalries and administrative power struggles. This could be exploited. Send them conflicting messages through different channels and play one department off against another. Seed one piece of deceptive evidence through a diplomatic channel to the State Department and provide another for a military spy satellite to pick up. Each department will then bring their own intelligence evidence to the top table. Factions within the administration just might over-emphasise their intelligence to serve their own interests and bolster their position. This will reinforce the deception.
3. American governments are increasingly driven by ideology. They tend to view the world through a narrow ideological lens rather than adopting a pragmatic approach. This makes them susceptible to ideological bias when decision-making. When evaluating intelligence, this provides a tendency to find what they are looking for, rather than see what is actually there. This gave the Iraqis an opportunity to show the Americans what they wanted to see. They dangled ‘evidence’ of WMD in front of the US government who took the bait.
Once the Iraqis knew how they were being monitored they could formulate a counter-intelligence strategy. They could study the characteristics of WMD engineering and fabricate the traces for US spy satellites to pick up.
For example, set up a desert facility with empty silos, false bunkers and some visible evidence of scientific activity. Drive trucks in a out to create the impression of large-scale activity and hey presto you’ve manufactured a pretty convincing spy satellite image for the Pentagon or CIA to digest.
Set up a couple of Iraqi commanders reading pre-prepared scripts over a ‘secure’ military communications network. Something like:
Ahmed: “Hey Khalid, you know those chemical weapons we’ve got in that bunker over there….”
Khalid: “Yeah”
Ahmed: “Well, I think we should hide them”
Follow that up with some particularly heavy truck activity at the desert installation that night to add to the illusion.
Also, find some disaffected Iraqi scientists. Set them up in a secret facility, brief them on plans for developing WMD and then give them the opportunity to defect. They’ll spill the beans and add that all-important human intelligence evidence to the mix.
Place orders across Europe and Asia for specialist steel tubing and manufacturing equipment. Domestic intelligence agencies will pick these up and feed them back to their American allies.
Forge links with Cuba to annoy the Americans and rattle their judgment.
They could then test and refine their counter-intelligence strategy by monitoring how the US reacts. Once they got really good at it they could probably predict how, and maybe even when, the Americans would respond to a particular piece of deceptive intelligence.
The Iraqis could then plant further circumstantial evidence for the Americans to find. CIA intercepts of staged military communications could result in a spy satellite being rerouted over a particular spot which can be ‘dressed up’ for the occasion. Show them what they want to see…
Remember Colin Powell’s PowerPoint presentation to the UN Security Council back in February 2003 ? He laid out ‘compelling evidence’ of an Iraqi WMD programme by showing satellite photos of suspected WMD plants in Iraq and transcripts of Iraqi military conversations.
Were these images and transcripts genuine or part of a detailed counter-intelligence campaign to make the world believe that Saddam was armed to the teeth with WMD ?
Judging by the fact that no weapons of mass destruction were ever found in Iraq it looks like Saddam’s weapons programmes were a clever deception. So clever, that it drove America and Britain to invade.
Imagine those first few weeks of the invasion when special forces teams were storming empty installations and raiding vacant bunkers. US Central Command would have had instant reports from the field.
You can just imagine special forces commanders radioing back from the WMD sites, ‘It’s empty… there’s nothing here, sir’.
When did the US finally realise they’d been had……?
So yeah... 