Bob Drogin

The ideal with respect to Intelligence is that it is apolitical and focused on developing a useful and accurate picture of the world and its many players, so that governments, individuals, and companies can make well-informed decisions. Intelligence at its best relies on a team of field agents and analysts, plus translators and a lot of experts from specific fields who lend their knowledge and expertise to allow for a more complete understanding of whatever information is brought in from the field. In movies and books and on TV, this is the ideal, and when this system breaks down or someone goes off-script, this deviation is a major part of the plot, because we all generally expect, or at least hope that real life intelligence services try very hard to stick close to the ideal.

Those of us who were old enough to remember the first Gulf War, and everything since, saw the changing narrative as rumors of WMD (weapons of mass destruction) in Iraq led us closer to a second war with Saddam Hussein. After September 11, 2001, even though it was Afghanistan we launched into war against, many people were already confused enough to think we were fighting Iraq already (again), and it was 'common knowledge' that Saddam had WMD, including weaponized germs like anthrax, that justified our being at war with him. I doubt that most people knew where this information really came from, just as I doubt most people really trust the CIA/FBI/etc. to be honest and open with the public these agencies serve. But even the more skeptical Americans I know may not have realized the extent of the intelligence mess that led us back into Iraq.

This book tells the story of where the WMD information came from that led into the second Gulf War, a lone defector whose story was provided to the CIA third-hand, and whose information morphed with each retelling, as the German and American intelligence agencies played a high stakes game of telephone, or Chinese whispers. And, unlike so many of the fictional CIA characters we see, the real ones were quite happy to run with the politically convenient story they were fed. I can't imagine the intelligence agents in the show NCIS, or Spooks/MI5 accepting elaborate information about a weapons program based solely on interviews by some other country's agents, of a source no one else gets to talk to. For a field where trust is so costly, trusting another country's intelligence that much and using that information to start a war without ever checking the reliability of the sources first seems silly, something a novice thriller-writer would try.

It is easy enough to see, while reading this book, what went wrong in the DIA, CIA and elsewhere with respect to the non-existent WMD in Iraq. It is much harder to see what could be done to prevent such disasters in the future. And, given the reasons this mess happened, I have to wonder if the culture of US Intelligence could ever really allow for reforms that would prevent such disasters from happening again. Many hundreds of thousands of lives were destroyed when a group of German agents and analysts decided to hoard their prize defector, and an entire region that was recovering from decades of violence was pushed back into a cycle of continued violence that continues today. No one person was responsible for the fact that misinformation became the justification for a very real, deadly, and unjust war, but rather the culture of international intelligence and that of US intelligence depends more on appearance than on real integrity. It really doesn't matter so much whether the information we use in developing policy is true or accurate, so long as it doesn't rock the boat or make the certain people or organizations look bad.

I most definitely recommend this book, especially to anyone who is interested in policy or intelligence.… (mais)