Treachery How America's Friends and Foes Are Secretly Arming Our Enemies

Chapter 1 The U.S. military intelligence team was in Iraq to find weapons. Not ones Saddam Hussein may have hidden. The 75th Intelligence Exploitation Group, a unit set up by the U.S. Central Command, was out to find the chemical and biological weapons that Saddam had indicated he would use on advancing U.S. troops. The rapid fall of Baghdad to U.S. and allied military forces in April 2003 created a different kind of problem for the Army spooks: looting. Hundreds of Iraqis, freed from Saddam Hussein's tyranny, began pillaging bombed-out ministries and burning government buildings. But the Army intelligence team was still able to get information about Saddam's regime. And in May, members of the team made an unusual discovery: Stashed away in an Iraqi ministry were a dozen blank French passports. For the soldiers, the passports confirmed suspicions about the French that had been growing since Paris sought to block U.S. efforts to oust Saddam before the war: They were clear evidence that the French were aiding the enemy. Earlier in 2003, U.S. intelligence officials had discovered that the French government had secretly helped officials from Saddam's dying regime flee from Iraq. French officials in Syria provided the passports to the Iraqis, intelligence revealed, and the travel documents gave Saddam's henchmen an easy exit. France is a member of the European Union, and the so-called Schengen Agreement provides that an EU passport holder can travel freely-that is, without any careful scrutiny by immigration authorities-through all but three EU countries (Britain, Denmark, and Ireland). The news that the French had enabled key Saddam aides to free Iraq was a closely guarded secret even within the U.S. intelligence community. U.S. operatives used sensitive intelligence-gathering methods to uncover the truth about the passports, and the intelligence was distributed to a very small group of senior government officials. But those who did learn what the French had done-including officials in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the military-were angry. The French had helped the Iraqi officials escape from justice. Coalition troops were uncovering more and more mass graves in Iraq, but the French had made it much harder to find out who was responsible and to put them on trial for war crimes. Even after Saddam Hussein was captured in a hole in Iraq in December 2003, many senior Saddam loyalists remained at large, and it was clear that large numbers had fled the country. "It made it very difficult to track these people," a senior Bush administration social said. Another social said, "It's like Raoul Wallenberg in reverse," referring to the Swedish diplomat who supplied travel documents to help Jews escape Nazi Germany in World War II. "Now you have the French helping the bad guys escape from us." After the Washington Times broke the story in early May 2003, some officials publicly commented on the relationship between France and Iraq. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said simply, "France has historically had a very close relationship with Iraq. My understanding is that it continued right up until the outbreak of the war. What took place thereafter, we'll find out." Rumsfeld had developed a reputation for poking his finger in the eye of news reporters whenever he had the chance; if he found one fact wrong, he never hesitated to embarrass a reporter in public or private over the error. But when asked specifically whether France had helped Iraqis escape, he said, "I've read those reports, but I don't have anything I can add to them." In a meeting before that press conference, Rumsfeld had been more direct; when aides told him that he would be asked about the French assistance, he replied, "Gertz had that story already." The secretary knew from the intelligence that had passed his desk that the report was true. Privately,Gertz, Bill is the author of 'Treachery How America's Friends and Foes Are Secretly Arming Our Enemies', published 2004 under ISBN 9781400053155 and ISBN 1400053153.