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further. CIA had no unilateral sources in the entire Gaza Strip. No access agents. No penetration agents. Not one single unilateral asset. CIA had trained more than twelve hundred Palestinian security personnel over the past half decade. But between bureaucratic infighting, blockheaded, risk-averse management, and just plain incompetence, Langley hadn’t managed to recruit a single one.
And therein lay the rub. All hell was breaking loose in Washington because CIA hadn’t had unilateral agents in Iraq before the war. There’d been satellite photos, of course. And signals intercepts by the thousands—so many that No Such Agency’s Arab-speaking translators were still working on material from 2001. But all of the human-source intelligence on which George W. Bush had based his decision to invade Iraq—all of it; every single report—had been supplied either by defectors provided by Iraqi resistance groups or through CIA’s liaison relationships with the Brits, the Germans, the Israelis, the Saudis, and the Jordanians.
That dependence on liaison, Tom growled, caused huge problems. When McGee asked how, Tom explained.
“Let’s say,” he said, “CIA gets a liaison report from MI6. The report says a trusted MI6 agent working in the Middle East has information that Saddam Hussein has developed mobile chemical weapons labs. The info-bit fits CIA’s preconceived picture about Saddam’s weapons-ofmass-destruction program. But it’s uncorroborated. Uncorroborated is unacceptable. But Langley doesn’t have any unilateral sources in Iraq. Instead, they e-mail the liaisons: Anybody out there hear anything about an Iraqi mobile weapons lab program?
“ ‘We did,’ Mossad answers. ‘Our military intelligence organization, AMAN, says it’s highly probable Saddam has mobile chemical/biological weapons labs moving around the country. We rate AMAN’s information source as highly credible.’
“Then CIA goes to the Iraqi defector groups. ‘You guys have anybody who knows about weapons laboratories built into tractor trailers?’ And the Iraqi National Congress or the Iraqi National Accord, figuring that CIA wants a positive response, tells CIA, ‘Sure, we hear about mobile chem/bio weapons labs all the time.’
“CIA says, ‘We want to interview a defector with firsthand knowledge.’ So INC flies a defector to Washington, where he’s interviewed and polygraphed. The defector’s polygraph, which shows no deception, is consistent with everything about mobile weapons labs CIA has learned so far.
“But the White House isn’t satisfied. The president says, ‘I won’t go to war unless we’ve nailed this down one hundred percent.’ So CIA goes to its pals in Berlin and asks about mobile weapons labs. BND, the German intelligence agency, tells CIA it interviewed an Iraqi defector pseudonymed CURVEBALL who confirmed that Saddam had mobile labs. He’d even worked on the program.
“Langley insists they want to talk to CURVEBALL. ‘Sorry,’ say the Krauts. ‘You know the rules: he is our unilateral source and we don’t compromise sources and methods.’
“No access is generally a no-no,” Tom continued. “But in this case, CIA shrugs its institutional shoulders because it doesn’t matter: the Agency now has multiple-source corroboration without talking to the BND’s source directly. Then Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet briefs the president again. And when Bush asks if Tenet is sure about his info, because the U.S. is going to war based on what CIA has uncovered, Georgie boy says, ‘Mr. President, this is a slam dunk.’ Three weeks later, a line about mobile biological weapons labs gets inserted into Secretary of State Colin Powell’s United Nations speech. When Powell asks Tenet if the information is solid, Tenet says something to the effect of not to worry, we got a triple confirmation. We’re talking twenty-four-karat.
“But what CIA doesn’t know is that London got its information from a