Axis of Deceit

The Extraordinary Story of an Australian Whistleblower

Andrew Wilkie

• Editorial: Black Inc. Agenda
• Año: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781921825699
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Inteligencia y espionaje

In the 2010 federal election, independent candidate Andrew Wilkie grabbed headlines after winning the seat of Denison, and with it a key role in deciding who would form the next government of Australia. Before he was a politician, however, Wilkie was Australia's most talked-about whistleblower.In March 2003, Wilkie resigned from Australia's peak intelligence agency in protest over the looming war in Iraq. He was the only serving intelligence officer from the 'coalition of the willing' – the US, the UK and Australia – to do so, and his dramatic move was reported throughout the world.Wilkie's act of conscience put him on a collision course with the Australian government. Why was he willing to risk his career and reputation to tell the truth? What happened when he decided to take a stand? In Axis of Deceit, Wilkie tells his story. He exposes how governments skewed, spun and fabricated intelligence advice. And he offers a rare glimpse into the world of international intelligence and life as a spook. With a brand-new preface, this is the fascinating inside story of a man now set to play a pivotal role in our public life.'A clear-eyed treatise on how the coalition of the willing conned the public about its motives for war' — Sydney Morning Herald 'A glimpse into the world of a modern spy' — The Age 'Impressive' — Canberra Times Andrew Wilkie is the author of Axis of Deceit. He was a lieutenant colonel in the Australian Defence Force before he joined the Office of National Assessments as a senior strategic analyst. After leaving ONA, he gave evidence at the official British and Australian inquiries into the case for the Iraq war. He contested John Howard's seat of Bennelong for the Greens in the 2004 federal election. In 2010 he stood successfully as an independent for the federal seat of Denison in Tasmania.

THE BIG LIE

The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.

—Ernest Hemingway

The invasion of Iraq was sold on the basis of that country possessing a massive arsenal of WMD and co-operating actively with terrorists.These claims were made in many different ways and have since been radically re-engineered, but the heart of the official case against Iraq made in Washington, London and Canberra was always as follows: Iraq possessed significant quantities of chemical and biological weapons, it was determined to acquire nuclear weapons, and it was consorting with al Qaida.

The September 2002 dossier, Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Assessment of the British Government, was a key building block for the case, not least because of its timing and scope.The buildup to war was well underway by the time the dossier was released – the dominant view within ONA by then was that war was inevitable – but never before had such a comprehensive, apparently intelligence-driven case been put publicly. The dossier’s main conclusions included the following:

Iraq has a useable chemical and biological weapons capability, in breach of UNSCR (United Nations Security Council Resolution) 687, which has included recent production of chemical and biological agents;
Iraq continues to work on developing nuclear weapons, in breach of its obligations under the Non-Proliferation Treaty and in breach of UNSCR 687. Uranium has been sought from Africa that has no civil nuclear application in Iraq;
Iraq’s military forces are able to use chemical and biological weapons, with command, control and logistical arrangements in place.The Iraqi military are able to deploy these weapons within 45 minutes of a decision to do so.¹

To many non-experts and some experts alike, the eagerly awaited dossier presented a strong case for war, strengthened further by the unambiguous foreword by Tony Blair himself:

I believe this issue to be a current and serious threat to the UK national interest … Saddam Hussein is continuing to develop WMD, and with them the ability to inflict real damage upon the region, and the stability of the world … It is clear that, despite sanctions, the policy of containment has not worked sufficiently well to prevent Saddam from developing these weapons … I am in no doubt that the threat is serious and current, that he has made progress on WMD, and that he has to be stopped.²

One of the most important US arguments for war was also made at this time, when George W. Bush delivered his 7 October 2002 Cincinnati address. As this was his last opportunity to convince Congress to vote for the possible use of the American military to enforce UN Security Council resolutions, he went in hard, especially on the nuclear and terrorism issues:

[Iraq] possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. It has given shelter and support to terrorism, and practices terror against its own people. The entire world has witnessed Iraq’s eleven-year history of defiance, deception and bad faith.
We know that Iraq and the al Qaida terrorist network share a common enemy – the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaida have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaida leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq … We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al Qaida members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein’s regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America.
The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his ‘nuclear mujahideen’ – his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminium tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.³

Congress was persuaded.

Bush’s 28 January 2003 State of the Union address comprised more of the same. Prominent was the claim that, ‘The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.’⁴

For his part, John Howard made it quite clear in his 4 February 2003 address to the Australian Parliament that his government endorsed the views being expressed in Washington and London, including those contained in the American and UK reports released on Iraq. He also sought to make clear Iraq’s association with the ‘War on Terror’:

The Australian government knows that Iraq still has chemical and biological weapons and that Iraq wants to develop nuclear weapons.
In hindsight the world has been too trusting – not careful enough in its dealings with the Iraqi President. But the situation is different now. Iraq has not changed – but we have. We now understand, after the event in Bali and those of 11 September 2001, that we are living in a world where unexpected and devastating terrorist attacks on free and open societies can occur in ways that we never before imagined possible.⁵

The following day the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, made probably the most comprehensive and persuasive case for the invasion of Iraq when he addressed the UN Security Council. The 5 February presentation in New York was a powerful performance by Bush’s most credible player, so much so that on one estimate the pro-war sentiment among editorial writers for large US newspapers doubled overnight (rising to three-quarters in favour).

Powell laid out an avalanche of allegations against Iraq. He unveiled an impressive collection of communications intercepts and grainy satellite photographs, along with information from mysterious human sources:

We know from Iraq’s past admissions that it has successfully weaponised not only anthrax, but also other biological agents including botulinum toxin, aflatoxin and ricin. But Iraq’s research efforts did not stop there.
Saddam Hussein has investigated dozens of biological agents causing diseases …
Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent
… Saddam Hussein already possesses two out of three key components needed to build a nuclear bomb. He has a cadre of nuclear scientists with the expertise and he has a bomb design.
Since 1998, his efforts to reconstitute his nuclear program have been focussed on acquiring the third and last component: sufficient fissile material to produce a nuclear explosion.To make the fissile material, he needs to develop an ability to enrich uranium. Saddam Hussein is determined to get his hands on a nuclear bomb.
Iraq and terrorism go back decades … But what I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaida terrorist network …⁶

Much more, of course, was said by the main players before the start of the war. Some public statements were quite hysterical, such as Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer’s 17 February 2003 speech at the Sydney Institute entitled ‘The Spread of Nuclear, Chemical and Biological Weapons:Tackling the Greatest Threat to Global Security – The Sum of All Our Fears’. Others were more sensible, such as British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s 7 March address to the UN Security Council entitled ‘We Have To Put Saddam to the Test’. But, whatever their style, all pushed the line that Iraq had to be disarmed because it possessed a substantial arsenal of WMD and was co-operating actively with global terrorists including al Qaida.

The powerful and apparently trustworthy status of these advocates lent great authority to the vast quantity of pro-war material being pushed out of Washington, London and Canberra – regardless of the merit or otherwise of the argument. As O’Brien had asked me on The 7.30 Report:‘But are you satisfied that you’re really in a position to know that … in the face of Colin Powell and all the credibility that he might muster?’ A fair question, even in retrospect.

The official case for war gained credibility in light of Iraq’s long history of interest in WMD. Iraq had established WMD programmes decades ago, out of concern for the threats posed to it by Israel and Iran.The chemical weapons programme was initiated in the late 1960s, contracts to purchase Scud missiles were first signed in 1972, the biological weapons programme was underway by the mid-1970s and a nuclear weapons capability was being pursued by the time of the first Gulf War in 1991. Moreover, that Iraq was prepared to use such weapons had been made terribly clear, first during its 1980–88 war with Iran, when large quantities of chemical weapons were used by both countries, and again in 1998 when Iraqi forces used chemical weapons against Kurds in northern Iraq.

All of this seemed to add up to a very weighty case against Iraq, and not one open to dispute. But of course I did want to dispute it.There is no single issue, or shocking secret report, or classified intelligence assessment that I can refer to in order to explain how the Iraq threat was blatantly exaggerated for political purposes.The process was not that dramatic. Rather, the US, UK and Australian governments were guilty of playing out the exaggeration over many months, in sometimes bold, but more often subtle ways.

Most often the deceit lay in the way Washington, London and Canberra deliberately skewed the truth by taking the ambiguity out of the issue. Key intelligence assessment qualifications were frequently dropped and much more definite words put in their place, even though such embellishments had not been offered to the governments by their intelligence agencies. Before we knew it, our political leaders had created a mythical Iraq, one where every factory was up to no good.

Crucially, there were significant intelligence gaps on Iraq. These were consistently filled with sequences of doubtful information based on worst-case assumptions, all of this finely tuned to reinforce the need to invade.

Two of these gaps are especially important: the unaccounted-for pre-1991 Gulf War WMD, and the uncertainty surrounding Iraq’s actions between the withdrawal of the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) in 1998 and the arrival of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) in late 2002.

The US, the UK and Australia all went to a great deal of trouble to highlight that, based on UN assessments, unaccounted-for WMD material included up to 360 tonnes of bulk chemical agent, up to 3000 tonnes of precursor chemicals, enough growth media to produce tens of thousands of litres of biological agent, and over 30,000 special munitions suitable for delivery of chemical and biological agents. However, the continued reference to these figures in the case for war appeared to me to be simply ridiculous, not least because no-one, not even the Iraqis themselves, knew exactly how much chemical and biological agent they’d produced, exactly how much was used during the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War or exactly how much was destroyed later outside of UNSCOM control.

Reliance on the list of unaccounted-for material was also absurd for another reason.The list failed to account properly for the critical issues of agent purity and degradation over time. Most chemical and biological agents soon break down unless produced to a very high level of purity and then effectively stabilised, but Iraq always had great difficulty achieving high levels of agent purity and it never developed the know-how to stabilise the finished products. Claims to the contrary are simply not substantiated by any hard intelligence. The exception to this, of course, is mustard gas, which can remain potent for many years, but this is a crude agent that must be used in vast quantities and in favourable conditions if it is to be effective as a WMD. The limited quantities identified in the list of agents unaccounted-for do not satisfy this criterion.The 550 shells mentioned by Powell during his address to the UN Security Council on 5 February would, between them, have amounted only to a very limited capability.

This brings me to the second major intelligence gap on Iraq – exactly what Saddam’s regime did between the withdrawal of UNSCOM and the arrival of UNMOVIC. In the main, the claims that Iraq had re-commenced production of chemical and biological agents had a simple basis: Iraq had started to rebuild facilities previously associated in some way with its WMD programme, as well as to build new facilities.Yet these claims were consistently unsupported by any hard evidence that such facilities were actually producing WMD. In fact the UK’s September 2002 dossier sometimes suggests quite the opposite; it refers to the Tarmiyah chemical research centre but notes that it undertook research, development and production of chemicals needed for Iraq’s civil industry, commodities that could not be imported because of the international sanctions.

These oft-repeated claims about so-called ‘dual-use’ facilities troubled me in the lead-up to the war. In all countries numerous facilities and materials used for legitimate purposes are suitable also for production of WMD-related materials – the US, the UK and Australia have thousands of such facilities. Accordingly, it was always preposterous that Washington, London and Canberra made such a fuss over Iraqi dual-use sites and materials in the absence of any corroborating intelligence. The reports were sometimes plainly silly. Much, for example, was made of the Fallujah II chlorine and phenol plant, although UNMOVIC had found it to be inoperative.

An important consideration here is the technical and practical difficulty of rebuilding, hiding, supplying and operating chemical and biological facilities on such a scale as to constitute a genuine national WMD programme.Washington, London and Canberra fostered the impression that such an undertaking was not a difficult one for an evil dictator with lots of oil money. But this is downright misleading. For the Iraqis to rebuild their WMD programme since 1998, virtually from scratch, would have been a substantial undertaking.Tellingly, even the US never perfected the military weaponisation of anthrax, although it devoted enormous resources to this and it had no need to hide its WMD programmes – hence in part its decision to end its offensive biological weapons programme and sign the Biological Weapons Convention.

There were also too many blatant inaccuracies and misrepresentations in the case against Iraq made by Bush, Howard and Blair.The UK’s September 2002 dossier singled out the Amariyah serum and vaccine plant west of Baghdad as a facility of concern, for example, but the dossier’s release was soon followed by reports from journalists who were allowed into the buildings at the plant within hours of the dossier’s release and found there empty fridges. Or again, when John Howard spoke in parliament of Iraq having ‘form’, he disregarded the intelligence advice he was receiving about the state of affairs in Iraq and instead dragged up a string of pre-1991 Gulf War examples, such as the use of chemical weapons against Iran and the Kurds.

On balance the strong, unambiguous language contained in the case for war seemed more the work of salespeople than professional intelligence officers. The claims that the repeated assertions reflected accurately the views of national intelligence agencies are plainly wrong.They were simply too much at odds with the piles of intelligence material I was privy to, including material from the CIA, INR and JIC. In all the material I saw on Iraq, never did I see such a string of unqualified and...

Índice

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• TAKING A STAND
• LIFE ON THE INSIDE
• THE WORLD OF INTELLIGENCE
• AN UNNECESSARY WAR
• THE BIG LIE
• BLAME GAME
• PUBLIC DISSERVICE
• INTELLIGENCE FAILURES
• SILENCING DISSENT
• EPILOGUE
• APPENDIX: PUBLISHING AXIS OF DECEIT
• GLOSSARY
• NOTES