FBI agent: Saddam used WMD as deception against Iran

Did Saddam Hussein slam-dunk CIA Director George Tenet with a deception operation aimed at Iran? It looks that way.

Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program was a deception to deter Iran, an FBI agent who spent nearly a year with the dictator says in a new book.

If true, the deception was one of the costliest mistakes in human history.

Special Agent George Piro befriended Saddam in what is described as a successful interrogation that yielded confessions about mass murder and about the WMD program that the US used as a pretext to invade in 2003.

Prominent intelligence writer Ronald Kessler authored the book, The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack. Kessler interviewed Piro who provided the account for the story.

Piro's account calls for an immediate classified and public assessment of how the US intelligence community detects and neutralizes deception. I don't think the community has been very willing to confront the issue, or to fix its own bureaucratic cultural biases in order to defend against such ruses. Higher education does little to fix the problem either, with the exception of places like The Institute of World Politics, where our new Master's degree program in strategic intelligence prepares current and prospective intelligence officers like no other school.

Comments

[Alison]

Just think about this: Would an FBI agent have been allowed to reveal information that would cause serious embarrassment to the US government? Of course not! Kessler confirms that Piro's account was vetted in advance by the Director of the FBI.

All this convoluted nonsense about Saddam having fooled the US into invading Iraq is just the latest official American cop-out. It is contradicted by Saddam's own public statements before and after the invasion. Saddam did not always co-operate fully with the UN weapons inspections teams during the 1990s because he knew they had been infiltrated by the CIA. Former UN Inspectors have confirmed that Iraq would have been given a clean bill of health in the mid 1990s had it not been for US pressure.