Chapter 1: What are the biases that shaped the WMD assessment?
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Welcome everybody, club members, new and old, secret squirrels, red and grey, to this special bonus episode of the Declassified Club. We hope you've had a chance to listen. You've been enjoying the series which is underway on Iraq and its missing weapons of mass destruction.
They're still missing.
They're still missing. It's still out there. Spoiler alert. To go alongside that, we have got some great interviews with people who were in the room when it all happened. And as well as some Brits, David, we did think it made sense to have an American along as well, not to make out that this was all a British disaster. Which it was.
Which it was.
Which it may have been. A very British disaster. I'm sure we'll come to that.
And we have one, don't we, David, who was at the heart of the CIA at the time. We do. We are very lucky to have with us today Michael Morrell, who is the former acting director and deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Michael spent 33 years at the CIA. And in addition to those roles, he spent two years as the director of intelligence, the agency's top analyst.
Michael is the only person who was both with President Bush on September the 11th. when Al-Qaeda burst into the American consciousness, and with President Obama on May 1st, when Osama bin Laden was brought to justice. Michael has also, teaser, agreed to return for an episode on 9-11, which we will release later this year.
Today, he's the co-founder and managing partner of a private global intelligence advisory firm called Ardwolf Global Solutions. He's also the author of a fantastic book,
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Chapter 2: How did Colin Powell's UN speech impact public perception?
on the fight against Al-Qaeda. It's also a memoir. It's called The Great War of Our Time, an insider's account of the CIA's fight against terrorism. I also found while I was reading Michael's bio that he apparently also has an Emmy. He's won an Emmy. Wow.
Isn't that cool? That's cool. Yeah. That's better than the Director's Award at CIA.
It's way better now. It's way better.
What for?
It was for writing Winds of Change, right? The Scorpion song, clandestinely. Absolutely, absolutely. Michael also, I should say, had the great fortune to review and edit many McCloskey authored analytic products, all of which were exceptionally illuminating, insightful, and very well written.
I saw your potential as a fiction writer very early, David.
Yes, yeah.
He was making it up even then.
That's right. He was making it up. Exactly.
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Chapter 3: What role did Michael Morrell play during the Iraq War?
I mean, this is handwritten. I know, I know, I know. You know, I was wondering, maybe I shouldn't have done this, but then I couldn't stop.
Right.
You can't not give some people a note. Part of the problem was we promoted people so quickly in the DI. When I went through my box of stuff, I had too many of these. I was like, how did I get promoted this many times? I guess I started as a GS6, to be fair. So there was a rapid rise early on.
For you, I just should have started Xeroxing them. Yeah, exactly.
I will say that you didn't vary the prose too much and the message. They're quite similar. All that to say, Michael, welcome to the show. Gordon, great to meet you. And David, always great to see you. Michael, we're obviously going to talk about Iraq and the WMD judgments, but we're having this conversation as the U.S. is engaged in another war of choice in the Middle East, this time with Iran.
Before we dive into Iraq, I wanted to ask, do you see any parallels or connections between these two conflicts that are 23 years apart?
Sure. Maybe just mention the one. There's a lot, right? But maybe mention the one that jumps out at me the most. We're going to talk about politicization later, but one of the common themes here is policymakers on a rock overstating the intelligence judgment's Less so on WMD, which we can talk about, and more so on Iraq's relationship to al-Qaeda.
But I think that has happened in this case as well. I don't read intelligence anymore. I don't get briefed on it. So I don't know exactly what the intelligence community is saying, but I'm pretty confident that Iran is not weeks away from a nuclear weapon.
They might be weeks away from enriching uranium to weapons grade for two or three weapons, but that is very different than actually having a weapon and very different than actually having a deliverable weapon. So the administration has repeatedly suggested that they are closer than I think the intelligence community thinks they are. And I think that's a parallel right back to Iraq.
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