What They Knew--And When They Knew It

When I heard that former CIA officer Tyler Drumheller--the top covert executive for Europe before his retirement last year--was telling 60 Minutes that the Agency knew the Niger uranium tale to be a myth long before the President stuffed it into the 2003 State of the Union, I wondered what that story was doing on a news program. After all, this was something we knew two and-a-half years ago, right? Well, it turns out there was BIG news in the Drumheller interview.

You may have heard the the CIA had recruited Saddam's foreign minister, Naji Sabri, as an American agent. Getting a someone at that level of a foreign government to spy for another country is generally the stuff of bad novels and high-concept movies, but we really did it. (The prospect of being strung from a lamppost, as those of Saddam's henchmen who could see beyond their propaganda fog must have envisioned their near futures, probably did a lot to help the recruitment drive.)

If Sabri's identity as an American agent was known before, this was not: Drumheller recounts that the Iraqi foreign minister told his American handlers that Saddam had no WMDs.

That's a real breakthrough. We now know that the administration is lying--for the thousandth time, true, but this is one of those lies that cost, and is still costing, countless lives--when it tries to make us think that top American officials were as hoodwinked about Saddam's much ballyhooed weapons programs just like the rest of the world. W and Deadeye Dick and Rummy and the rest of the gang not only knew that the Niger yellowcake was fiction, but that the whole idea that Saddam was stockpiling nerve gas and biological agents was also a myth. So when they tell us, "Hey, everyone thought the guy had weapons of mass destruction; how were we to know any different?" they are playing us again. They did know.

Hard to believe after all this time, but we can now see that the fraud that got us into Iraq was even worse than it has seemed to be.