“It just sticks in my craw every time I hear them say it’s an intelligence failure, it’s an intelligence failure. This was a policy failure”

“The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming. And they [the White House] were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy.”

—Tyler Drumheller, 60 Minutes, April 2006

Position: Chief of the CIA European Division
Tenure: 2001 to 2005

In April of 2006, CBS’ 60 Minutes featured an interview with a former top-ranking CIA official, Tyler Drumheller. Such an interview was a rare, if not unprecedented, event. What made Drumheller do it?

Drumheller felt compelled to defend an agency he had served for over 25 years, the last four years as chief of the CIA’s European Division. In that high position he had intimate knowledge of the most controversial pre-war information regarding Iraq’s alleged WMD programs. He says a White House bent on war cherry-picked the intelligence it wanted and ignored anything it did not want to hear.

Included in the intelligence the White House ignored was a debriefing Drumheller supervised in the fall of 2002 with Iraq’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri. Sabri revealed that Iraq had no nuclear weapons program and had destroyed its entire stockpile of chemical and biological agents. But, Drumheller told CBS, “The group that was dealing with preparations for the Iraq war came back and said they’re 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.’ ” Despite Sabri’s position in Saddam Hussein’s inner circle, Administration officials claimed his information wasn’t reliable because it came from just one source.

On other occasions, the White House seemed only too happy to rely on a single source. In the fall of 2002, reference was made in a National Intelligence Estimate to an Iraqi program involving mobile chemical weapons laboratories. Reports of the labs were said to originate from first-hand accounts of Iraqi defectors. Tyler Drumheller knew that information came from a single source: an Iraqi chemical engineer in the custody of German intelligence codenamed Curveball. Drumheller had repeatedly warned his superiors that German intelligence had grave doubt about the veracity of Curveball’s information. He met a German counterpart for lunch to get an assessment of Curveball. “Don’t even ask to see him because he’s a fabricator and he’s crazy,” the agent told Drumheller. Drumheller says all the concerns about Curveball’s reliability were well-known amongst top CIA and Administration officials before the mobile labs became one of the centerpieces of the 2003 State of the Union address and Colin Powell’s February address to the United Nations in support of war.