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Chargement... Curveball: Spies, Lies, and the Con Man Who Caused a Warpar Bob Drogin
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. Well-told story on an Iraqian that wanted a Mercedes and got to tell an elaborate fantasy to the German secret service which the USA & Co. used as one of the main escuses to get into war with Iraq. Bob Drogin has built up mavelous trust with secret agents, so he get first hand accounts. Well researched and well executed. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
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This book answers the crucial question of the Iraq war: How and why was America's intelligence so catastrophically wrong? Journalist Drogin takes us to Europe, the Middle East, and deep inside the CIA to find the truth. In 1999, a mysterious Iraqi applies for political asylum in Munich, offering compelling testimony of Saddam Hussein's secret program to build weapons of mass destruction. He claims that the dictator has constructed germ factories on trucks. His grateful German hosts pass his account to their CIA counterparts, who give the defector his code name: Curveball. After 9/11, when the Bush administration turns its attention to Iraq, they seize on Curveball's story--even though it has begun to unravel. The CIA allows President Bush to cite Curveball's unconfirmed claims in a State of the Union speech--yet the entire case is based on a fraud. And the proof was clear before the war.--From publisher description. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)956.7044History and Geography Asia Middle East IraqClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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Those of us who were old enough to remember the first Gulf War, and everything since, saw the changing narrative as rumors of WMD (weapons of mass destruction) in Iraq led us closer to a second war with Saddam Hussein. After September 11, 2001, even though it was Afghanistan we launched into war against, many people were already confused enough to think we were fighting Iraq already (again), and it was 'common knowledge' that Saddam had WMD, including weaponized germs like anthrax, that justified our being at war with him. I doubt that most people knew where this information really came from, just as I doubt most people really trust the CIA/FBI/etc. to be honest and open with the public these agencies serve. But even the more skeptical Americans I know may not have realized the extent of the intelligence mess that led us back into Iraq.
This book tells the story of where the WMD information came from that led into the second Gulf War, a lone defector whose story was provided to the CIA third-hand, and whose information morphed with each retelling, as the German and American intelligence agencies played a high stakes game of telephone, or Chinese whispers. And, unlike so many of the fictional CIA characters we see, the real ones were quite happy to run with the politically convenient story they were fed. I can't imagine the intelligence agents in the show NCIS, or Spooks/MI5 accepting elaborate information about a weapons program based solely on interviews by some other country's agents, of a source no one else gets to talk to. For a field where trust is so costly, trusting another country's intelligence that much and using that information to start a war without ever checking the reliability of the sources first seems silly, something a novice thriller-writer would try.
It is easy enough to see, while reading this book, what went wrong in the DIA, CIA and elsewhere with respect to the non-existent WMD in Iraq. It is much harder to see what could be done to prevent such disasters in the future. And, given the reasons this mess happened, I have to wonder if the culture of US Intelligence could ever really allow for reforms that would prevent such disasters from happening again. Many hundreds of thousands of lives were destroyed when a group of German agents and analysts decided to hoard their prize defector, and an entire region that was recovering from decades of violence was pushed back into a cycle of continued violence that continues today. No one person was responsible for the fact that misinformation became the justification for a very real, deadly, and unjust war, but rather the culture of international intelligence and that of US intelligence depends more on appearance than on real integrity. It really doesn't matter so much whether the information we use in developing policy is true or accurate, so long as it doesn't rock the boat or make the certain people or organizations look bad.
I most definitely recommend this book, especially to anyone who is interested in policy or intelligence. ( )