Secret `squirrels' Join Desperate Hunt For Weapons
The Age
Thursday June 19, 2003
An overhaul of the search for Saddam Hussein's elusive weapons of mass destruction is creating an operation strikingly similar to the United Nations inspection system that Bush Administration officials derided before the war, military and intelligence officials say.
Unlike the UN teams, however, the new weapons hunt will rely chiefly on ``secret squirrels", as US commanders call the growing army of CIA and military intelligence operatives, National Security Agency eavesdroppers, British MI6 agents and elite Special Operations teams.
In addition to the latest techniques, the American, British and Australian teams will have the advantage in the postwar occupation of what one commander called ``unfettered access to Iraqis at all levels", at gunpoint if necessary.
The 1400 people in the Iraq Survey Group, as the new effort is called, will employ many of the same highly intrusive investigative and covert intelligence-gathering techniques that UN inspectors secretly used between 1991 and 1998 to find and destroy vast quantities of illicit Iraqi weapons and arms materials.
Brigadier-General Steve Meekin, the senior Australian officer in the Iraq Survey Group, said the new effort resembled the former UN inspection system because it would focus on collecting clues and not just searching buildings.
Brigadier Meekin, the commander of a centre studying captured military equipment, a key part of the new group, said the number and quality of leads coming in was increasing gradually. ``We haven't had any single dramatic discoveries," he said, ``but we're getting closer."
The redesign was ordered after US field commanders acknowledged that the existing weapons hunt probably would not find any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, one of the chief reasons President George Bush had cited for going to war.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair came under greater pressure yesterday after two former cabinet ministers said intelligence agencies had been unable to provide clear evidence in private briefings before the war that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
The pair, Robin Cook and Clare Short, told a parliamentary inquiry that Mr Blair exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi leader in order to gain public and parliamentary support for the war.
Mr Cook accused the Prime Minister of carefully selecting evidence from an ``alphabet soup" of material to back up his conviction that Saddam had to be toppled.
Ms Short said the intelligence agency MI6 had told her that Iraqi scientists were working on chemical and biological weapons, but were unable to say that Saddam represented an immediate threat. ``This is where the falsity lies," she said.
The Commons' cross-party Foreign Affairs Select Committee is investigating the use of intelligence material in the lead-up to the war, in particular claims by Mr Blair made in a dossier presented in Parliament last September that Iraq had the capacity to launch chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes.
While their criticisms were expected, the stinging attack by the former ministers is expected to set the tone of the inquiry that will be addressed by former Australian intelligence office Andrew Wilkie later today.
Mr Wilkie, formerly with the Office of National Assessment, is expected to be highly critical of the way the Australian Government used now-suspect and allegedly doctored evidence to sell Australia's involvement in the war. -- with Washington Post
OPINION Hugh White NEWS 15
© 2003 The Age