[Mb-civic] <no subject>

[Allison Burnett]

A Spy Speaks Out


"The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for
intelligence to fit into the policy."
Tyler Drumheller


(CBS) A CIA official who had a top role during the run-up to the Iraqi war
charges the White House with ignoring intelligence that said there were no
weapons of mass destruction or an active nuclear program in Iraq.

The former highest ranking CIA officer in Europe, Tyler Drumheller, also
says that while the intelligence community did give the White House some bad
intelligence, it also gave the White House good intelligence ‹ which the
administration chose to ignore.

Drumheller talks to 60 Minutes correspondent Ed Bradley in his first
television interview this Sunday, April 23 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Drumheller, who retired last year, says the White House ignored crucial
information from a high and credible source. The source was Iraq's foreign
minister, Naji Sabri, with whom U.S. spies had made a deal.

When CIA Director George Tenet delivered this news to the president, the
vice president and other high ranking officials, they were excited ‹ but not
for long. 

"[The source] told us that there were no active weapons of mass destruction
programs," says Drumheller. "The [White House] group that was dealing with
preparation for the Iraq war came back and said they were no longer
interested. And we said 'Well, what about the intel?' And they said 'Well,
this isn't about intel anymore. This is about regime change.' "

They didn't want any additional data from Sabri because, says Drumheller:
"The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for
intelligence to fit into the policy."

The White House declined to respond to this charge, but Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice has stated that Sabri was just one source and therefore not
reliable. 

Drumheller says the administration routinely relied on single sources ‹ when
those single sources confirmed what the White House wanted to hear.

"They certainly took information that came from single sources on the
yellowcake story and on several other stories with no corroboration at all,"
he says. The "yellowcake story" refers to a report the CIA received in late
2001 alleging that Iraq had purchased 500 tons of uranium from Africa,
presumably to build a nuclear bomb.

Many in the CIA doubted the uranium report from the beginning, and continued
to doubt it, even as White House speechwriters tried to include the report
in the president¹s speeches.

In a major speech the president was scheduled to give in Cincinnati, the
leadership of the CIA intervened directly to remove the uranium report from
the speech. But that didn't stop it from making it into the president's
State of the Union address a short time later.   "As a British report," says
Drumheller. A senior CIA official signed off on the speech only because the
uranium reference was attributed to the British.

"It just sticks in my craw every time I hear them say it's an intelligence
failure. Š This was a policy failure. Š I think, over time, people will look
back on this and see this is going to be one of the great, I think, policy
mistakes of all time," Drumheller tells Bradley.


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