Few things age as poorly as bad intelligence. And while there was no shortage of terrible intelligence undergirding the Iraq war, there was no more bewildering claim given credulity by the CIA and the Bush administration than the idea that Saddam Hussein was going to use drones to unleash a merciless biological attack.
It's practically forgotten now. But repeatedly nestled into the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq -- the much-flawed summary document from the 16 intelligence agencies accusing Saddam Hussein of possessing weapons of mass destruction -- is a wild claim that anticipated the current drone panic by a full decade.
Saddam was "working with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which allow for a more lethal means to deliver biological and, less likely, chemical weapons," the 2002 estimate reads (.pdf). The claim was one of the intelligence agencies' "Key Judgments" sent to Congress ahead of the vote for war, and the bioweapon-drone idea made its way into Secretary of State Colin Powell's infamous case for invading Iraq at the United Nations.
These drones would "threaten" Iraq's neighbors, U.S. forces stationed in the Persian Gulf, "and if brought close to, or into, the United States, the US homeland." (Emphasis in the original.) An analysis of what the document called "special intelligence" allegedly gave reason to believe there was an "Iraqi UAV procurement network" working on buying commercially available mapping software to target America at home with its indigenous drones. At the United Nations, Powell elaborated that Iraq was "developing and testing spray devices that could be adapted for UAVs" to unleash deadly bioweapons.
Ten years to the day after the invasion, the bio-drone allegation reads like something out of a fever dream. Saddam had no drone program of any significance. He built something called the RPV-30A, or "al-Quds," (shown above) a drone with a 24-foot wingspan (shown above) in a few different iterations starting in the late 1990s. When Iraq showed it off to reporters shortly before the invasion, likely as a propaganda ploy, John Burns of the New York Times mocked it as "something out of the Rube Goldberg museum of aeronautical design than anything that could threaten Iraq's foes."
Needless to say, it was never weaponized for biological-weapon distribution. Iraq's biological weapons stocks had mostly been destroyed years before. No nation, in fact, has ever stocked drones with bio-weapons. The estimate actually pre-dated the first-ever drone strike, in Yemen by a U.S. Predator drone, in November 2002. A postwar investigation sponsored by the CIA ultimately concluded that the al-Quds drone program was actually "an initiative to meet an Iraqi military desire for airborne electronic warfare platforms."
The whole idea was too rich for Air Force intelligence, which issued a dissent within the National Intelligence, albeit a tepid one. "The small size of Iraq's new UAV strongly suggests a primary role of reconnaissance," reads the caveat from the Air Force, which had the greatest expertise on drones within the intelligence community, "although CBW [chemical or biological warfare] delivery is an inherent capability."
It's amazing, in retrospect, that any member of the U.S. spy community bought the claim. Retired CIA official Paul Pillar was one of the lead analysts working on the 2002 estimate. As a Mideast expert, he didn't have the technical chops to assess the claim and says he doesn't remember the internal debate about it, but recalled that the hanging over the entire document was a sense that war was an inevitability, no matter what the intelligence said.
"The people doing this work were doing so in a highly charged political environment, in which the policy preferences were very highly known," Pillar recalls to Danger Room. "To pretend that didn't make a difference is a fever dream." On Monday, another former CIA analyst, Nada Bakos, described that same "highly charged political environment."
The intelligence agencies currently view the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq as one of their most infamous failures. And since that the estimate got way more fundamental things wrong -- the existence of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction programs -- it's been easy for the bioweapons-drone idea to fall down the memory hole. But it's worth remembering the next time a president wants to launch a war based on secret intelligence or baroque technological claims.
