Secrets and Lies

Key dossiers on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction censored – reports about prisoner abuse ignored

An Australian intelligence insider, Rod Barton, reveals how key dossiers on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were censored, and how his early reports to Canberra about prisoner abuse were ignored. This interview conducted by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Liz Jackson on the programme Four-Corners took place in mid-February 2005. In the following we reprint parts of the transcript.

Liz Jackson: Rod Barton worked for Australian Intelligence for over 20 years and, most recently, on contract in Iraq. (...) Last year Rod Barton was in Baghdad working for the CIA’s special advisor to the Iraq Survey Group. He resigned in disgust when CIA officials censured his reports. (...) Rod Barton was in the first team of weapons inspectors that went into Iraq back in 1991. The fires from Gulf War I were still burning. (...) Trained as a microbiologist, Rod was seconded from Australia’s Defence Intelligence Organisation to work with UNSCOM, the United Nations team sent to verify that Iraq had destroyed its weapons of mass destruction. Here he’s cross-examining Iraqi officials about 20 tonnes of missing bacterial growth medium, on the verge of one of UNSCOM’s triumphs, forcing the Iraqis to concede they had, indeed, embarked on a biological weapons program. This discovery put him on the front page of ‘The New York Times’.

But as time passed and the triumphs were few and far between, Rod Barton came to realise that there were secret arrangements between people at UNSCOM and the CIA. US intelligence arranged for a sophisticated bugging device to be hidden inside UNSCOM’s base at the Canal Hotel, with United States having control of the information flow. The head of UNSCOM was Australian Richard Butler.

Rod Barton: I think we were compromised towards the end (...) because the United States wanted us to put in special equipment to intercept Iraqi communications, and we did this.

LJ: Was the United Nations itself aware that it was being used as a method for spying for the CIA?

RB: You say ‘United Nations’. I’m talking about UNSCOM, which was a body of the Security Council, the executive chairman who was Richard Butler would’ve been aware of what the capabilities of the black box was.

LJ: So he knew that as head of UNSCOM the information that you were collecting was broader than weapons, and was going to US intelligence agencies?

RB: I believe he would’ve known that, yes.

LJ: How much did that compromise the mission that you had?

RB: Well, eventually when this all became known, I think it fatally compromised UNSCOM. Don’t forget, we’re a UN body. Iraq was a member state of the United Nations, and here we are spying on it – not only we, the United Nation – but it was the United States that was receiving the information – in fact, all the information. And that was fatal, I believe, to UNSCOM, and we finished our last inspections in December ‘98 and the organisation was wound up in 1999.

LJ: Who would’ve authorised the installation of the black box?

RB: Well, it’d have to be the executive chairman, who was Richard Butler at the time.

LJ: What did you think about that decision?

RB: I think that was an error of judgment by Richard Butler.

LJ: Richard Butler has told ‘Four Corners’ he did authorise the black box to help locate the weapons. He denies he knew it had other capabilities, but could not rule out that he had been misled.

RB: I felt annoyed about this because it did bring down the downfall of UNSCOM. We weren’t making much progress, it’s true, but while we were there, we were preventing Iraq really from doing anything significant. Once we left, then who knows what was happening? (...) As it turns out, not much. Well, a lot of people believed, of course, just the opposite.

LJ: And that belief itself?

RB: Well, that belief itself probably led to the war in 2003.

LJ: By 2003, as the United States talked up the threat from Iraq, Rod Barton was quietly working as the special advisor to the UN’s Chief Weapons Inspector Hans Blix. Few people were aware that an Australian was at the heart of the intelligence assessments as to whether Iraq was complying with the UN’s call to disarm. Rod Barton helped Hans Blix write the crucial reports for the Security Council on whether there were grounds to back America’s call for a pre-emptive war.

During that period of time that you were working with Hans Blix, did you feel that there was a possibility that war could be avoided?

RB: My belief at that stage was that war was inevitable. Inspections may delay the war, may put it off, but I didn’t see how we, as inspectors, could resolve the issues that the United States wanted to be resolved.

LJ: So how did you feel writing reports for Hans Blix to deliver to the Security Council of the United Nations if you felt that whatever you said, war was going to happen?

RB: I thought it was rather futile.

LJ: In early January 2003, before Australia officially committed to war, our intelligence agencies prepared an assessment on WMD for Prime Minister John Howard. It was classified secret – for Australian eyes only. A draft of the sections on chemical and biological weapons were driven round to Rod Barton’s home in Canberra, for his expert assessment.

RB: My belief was that they had a few weapons retained from 1991, which will be ageing weapons of limited use. Were they a threat? Well, they may have been of minor threat to their neighbours, because don’t forget they didn’t really have the delivery systems then, they didn’t have an air force. They may have been a minor threat to their neighbours, but a threat to the United States or the UK or Australia? No.

LJ: And did you give the assessment that you’ve just given me?

RB: Yes, that’s the advice I gave.

LJ: No capacity to deliver?

RB: Yes. I mean, what countries do with this advice is up to them.

LJ: Who exactly asked you for that advice?

RB: I don’t want to go into who talked to me about this, no.

LJ: Fair enough. But in terms of countries; the United States and Australia?

RB: Yes, both countries asked me for views. Don’t forget, I had all this intelligence background from before, so I know I provided my views, for what they were worth.

LJ: I’m interested particularly in your reaction to Britain’s assessment in relation to the 45-minute capacity to mount an attack, a chemical or biological attack; what did you think when you heard that claim?

RB: Well, I remember most of us thought it was nonsense, and this is virtually what we said to Blix; “This does not make sense to us.” We don’t know that. We don’t know where the information came from. We certainly didn’t have information ourselves that would indicate this, but even as stated, it’s a nonsensical statement.

LJ: Rod Barton asked his former UNSCOM colleague, Dr David Kelly, where the 45-minute claim had come from. This was the same David Kelly later named as the source of a BBC story that the British had sexed-up their intelligence reports.

RB: David Kelly came to New York quite often. Of course, he was not working for the UN. He was working for the British Government as their senior scientific advisor on this, on these matters, and I remember having dinner with him in a pub, an Irish pub in New York, and I challenged him. I said, you know “What’s this nonsense about this 45?” I said “Why did you write this, David?”, knowing full well David would not have written about the 45 minutes, and he was quite embarrassed and he said, “Oh well, some people put in what they want to put in.” (...)

LJ: What’s your view about the way he was treated by the British Government?

RB: Oh, atrociously and, of course, that led to his suicide, and I do believe it was suicide – led to his suicide later. (...)

LJ: One month after George Bush declared that major hostilities were over, the US committed over a thousand new inspectors to find the missing weapons. They were called the Iraq Survey Group, and were placed under the direction of the CIA. Rod Barton joined them in late 2003, in their base at Camp Slayer on the outskirts of Baghdad. (...) Rod Barton was employed to be the special advisor to David Kay, the director of the Iraq Survey Group. But when he arrived in Baghdad, David Kay was gone. Kay had realised, as he would shortly tell the Senate, that there was nothing to find.

RB: David Kay, of course, was one of those who really believed that Iraq had quite massive capabilities, including a nuclear program, and that’s his background, nuclear, so he ...

LJ: So it was a major turnaround for him?

RB: Yeah, he was quite shaken. He thought that they would be tripping over these weapons, and they would be everywhere, and if they couldn’t find the weapons, there’d be plenty of indication about the weapons, and by the end of the year he’d discovered the truth, and so he left, not ever to return.

LJ: So when you, in a sense, took over his role for that period of time – we’re talking the end of 2003, beginning of 2004 – when he’s just on the verge of saying “We’re almost all wrong,” what pressure on you was there to maintain the belief that you were still out there looking for weapons?

RB: Well, when I got out there, the attitude was “Well, we still haven’t finished the work, how can we come to this conclusion? There is still a lot we have to do, Iraq is a big county.”

LJ: They’re still there, out there. They’re out there somewhere?

RB: Yes. The attitude was you’ve only got to go out there and you will find them. I was an experienced inspector, and I knew that there would be some indicators if they really had a program, and there were no indicators whatsoever; they couldn’t have possibly hidden all of this. So I knew there were no weapons, and there were no programs at that stage, and therefore our job was just to write what we had found.

LJ: And when did you first get an intimation that this kind of report that you were planning on writing – that would in a sense dot the I’s, cross the T’s on why there weren’t any weapons – was not the report that was wanted, not the report that was expected?

RB: Well, it was not until the new head of the Iraq Survey Group came out in mid February 2004 that things really changed.

LJ: And what was the first sign of that change for you?

RB: Well, he talked to me about a different style of report altogether, and he said he’d discussed this with people in Washington, the head of the CIA and -

LJ: The President?

RB: Well, he’d met the President and he discussed his job in Iraq with President Bush, and now he’d come out to Iraq – this is Charles Duelfer I’m talking about, the new head of the ISG – and wanting a different type of report to what I was producing, a much shorter report, a report that had no conclusions in it. When we’d found out a lot, we knew a lot of the answers. (...) I said to him “I believe it’s dishonest. If we know certain things, and we’re asked to provide a report, we should say what we found and what we haven’t found, and put that in the report,” and most of it’s already written.

LJ: And what were the things that weren’t to be said.

RB: Well, there were some things – this didn’t come directly from Charles, but some of his staff, the senior CIA staff, some of the things we couldn’t write about at all; for example, aluminium tubes that might have been involved in nuclear weapons programs. We were allowed to refer to them, but not say what we thought they were all about, and our conclusions at that stage is that the aluminium tubes that Iraq had imported were part of a rocket program, and nothing to do with nuclear. They were not to do with nuclear enrichment. That was one issue.

LJ: And you weren’t to say that?

RB: We weren’t to say that. We were not allowed to put that in. In our previous report we’d addressed about mobile biological program, and mobile production facilities of which we had, apparently, according to the CIA – we had two examples of these mobile production units actually in our camp at the ISG camp. (...) Well, we’d inspected these and these were nothing to do with biology in our view.

LJ: But it was still being put out into the public domain that these two trailers were mobile biological (...)

RB: It was on the CIA web page that these were mobile biological trailers. This was not our conclusion. In fact, our conclusion was just absolutely the opposite. They were nothing to do with biology. We believed that they were hydrogen generators.

LJ: But not to mention that either?

RB: In fact, if you did a word search of our report that eventually went ahead, Charles’ report, you would not have found the word “trailer”. We did not even mention these trailers.

LJ: Don’t mention the trailers?

RB: No, don’t mention the trailers.

LJ: Quote: “Rod Barton’s notes, 15 February 2004 – the trailers – Charles’ attitude was he did not want to inspect them or know, then he could genuinely say in Washington that he doesn’t know what they are for.”

RB: We don’t want to know what they are. It’s just too politically difficult, and I was told politically difficult to put this in, and I said “But we are not” – I said, “We are not political. We are apolitical. We have to be objective.” “No, you cannot write about this,” so that did not go into the report either.

LJ: Why politically difficult in particular, because political statements were being made precisely at that time, or -

RB: Because statements were still being made. In early January (...) Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, was still using the trailers as an example of WMD program, that is yet to be uncovered, and yet this was not our view at all.

LJ: What about our own political leaders? (...) I remember there were statements made about the trailers here. (...)

RB: Alexander Downer had been making statements about the trailers, but that was much earlier on, that was in mid 2003.

Those statements were not correct. Even then they were not correct, or not fairly based upon what had been discovered, and I don’t believe he should have made such statements. (...)

LJ: Back to the report: you told us about the things that you were told to leave out. Was there anything you were told to put in?

RB: Yes. Well, of course, there were interests in the capitals. We had these video conferences and the report was circulated in its draft form to the various capitals, and both Washington and London wanted other things put in, and to make it – I can only use these words – to make it sexier, and this came from the UK. They wanted to put in, or at least one individual there, wanted to put in what he called ‘nuggets’, and he’d selected something like eight or nine issues which he thought could (...) sex-up the report. Basically what he wanted to do was put in things from the previous report which had been done in September 2003, David Kay’s report, pick out the eyes from that report, which implied that there was WMD up there, and put them into our report. (...) It was John Scarlett, yes, who was the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee in the UK.

LJ: Quote: “18 March 2004 at 1700 – Rod Barton noted John Scarlett’s desire to include some nuggets. It was Scarlett who’d signed off Britain’s claim that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes.”

RB: And here he is again, in February 2004, trying to sex-up our report, and I had an email from him, through Charles, about the things he wanted in, and I looked at these and I thought “We cannot accept any of these – just on principle for a start,” and Charles, to his credit, decided the same, that we would not put any of them in, but the report was still awful. (...) We left the impression that yes, maybe there were WMD out there; maybe there were programs still to find, and all our future work – because it was forward looking – all our future work might discover this. We were going to do this and we were going to do that. So I thought it was dishonest.

LJ: On 30th March 2004, Charles Duelfer presented the Iraq Survey Group’s interim report to the US Congress.

By then Rod Barton had resigned in protest, and left Baghdad.

RB: I felt that I was part of the dishonesty by being there, by continuing on with this, and so although I quite enjoyed the work, I did leave, and immediately the report was finished. I was on the next plane out. (...) There was a British colleague of mine who already left for similar reasons, and again a former UNSCOM inspector, one of the most senior people, or experienced people around, and he left on similar grounds. (...) It was censorship, and he said “I can’t live with this,” and he made it clear that he was going to leave and left for that same reasons.

LJ: (...) You set out your views, and your reasons for resigning in a letter.

RB: Yes, I wrote -

LJ: ... at a very senior level here, to the Department of Defence.

RB: Yes. I didn’t want the people to think I’d left for family reasons, or personal reasons, or something like that. I wanted to make it clear to them I’d left because I thought the process was dishonest.

LJ: And what was their response?

RB: (...) I knew what the reaction would be. I knew they were not going to be welcoming me with open arms and saying “You did the right thing.” I didn’t get any of that. I just got (...) the cold shoulder, basically

LJ: 24 March ‘04, Singapore – Quote: “I will be sidelined and branded as a troublemaker.”

You didn’t just tell the Department of Defence about your concerns about political censorship and pressure; you also drew their attention to your concerns about prisoner abuse in the camp in which the scientists and Government officials that you were interviewing or interrogating were living.

RB: Yes. (...) There’s a prison where what is known as the high value detainees are kept. It’s called camp Cropper and it’s near the airport. (...) And we had – when I say “we”, the ISG and other agencies in Iraq, other coalition agencies – have prisoners kept there, about 100 prisoners in all, and these are all the senior people from Iraq. When I came back I talked to a senior defence official and I mentioned – and I regret it was only a mention – of my concern about prisoner abuse, because you have to remember I’m talking about the end of March, beginning of April, none of us had seen the pictures of ... (...) this was before Abu Ghraib, but I had certain indications and certain evidence that this had occurred, and I felt strongly enough about it to make a recommendation not only to mention this about the abuse, but to make a recommendation that we shouldn’t – “we” meaning Australia – should not be involved in the interview or interrogation of any of these prisoners at Cropper, and I made that recommendation.

LJ: Because of your concerns about prison abuse at Camp Cropper.

RB: Yes, yes. I do regret now not pushing it harder then. Having known what I knew, I should have made more of a case of it, but I thought “Well, I’ve done my job and,” but I suspected they were not going to do anything for the very fact that they asked me more questions about it. (...) No-one asked me any more questions about prisoner abuse whatsoever, and I gather later that nothing was done about it. Nothing was followed up. The conversation, the information I provided, finished there, with the senior officer.

LJ: How senior are we talking?

RB: First assistant secretary level, Department of Defence. (...)

LJ: Can you tell me why you had concerns? (...)

RB: Well, it was during the tour of the prison when I first started to realise there was something wrong here, and, first of all, the cells seemed very small. Well, of course, cells are small, but there were people kept in isolation there, and I thought that that was wrong; solitary confinement, basically. (...) 1.5 by 2 metres, perhaps a little bit bigger. That is a small cell (...) enough room to lie down in, and that’s about it. (...) No light, no natural light.

LJ: On 24 March 2004 Rod Barton recorded his growing concern.

RB: Quote: “The high value detainees thoughts. Have there been abuses? Simple answer is yes.”

They had a hessian bag pulled over their head, and I think that was part of this disorientation process, softening up, sort of, purgatory before they actually finish up in the prison, and that I understood lasted for a couple of days. I wondered whether, even at the time, how legitimate that was, but I understood that the softening up process was not beating, it was just disorientation.

LJ: When did you get the sense that it was not just disorientation?

RB: Well, these realisations come on you gradually, and every week they would brief on a prisoner, who’d be prisoner of the week. (...) they would show us a prisoner and give a little profile on that, and it was during this presentation they would show a picture of the prisoner, and on two occasions it was clear that the prisoners had abrasions about the face. I worried about this because, you know, how did they get these abrasions, and the question was asked of why they appeared to have been beaten; and the answer was “”Well, this photograph was taken shortly after their arrest, and they resisted arrest.” Well, on the first occasion perhaps; second occasion you begin to wonder, and then you think, “Why would they get beaten about the face like that?” And it seemed to me that this was not just during the arrest, that this was perhaps a softening up process, and this was deliberate.

LJ: When you recommended as a result of your concerns the Australians no longer be involved in interrogating prisoners at Camp Cropper, do you know what happened with that recommendation?

RB: No.

LJ: In April the pictures from Abu Ghraib became public. A few weeks later Rod Barton was emailed a questionnaire from the Department of Defence, sent to all personnel who’d served in Iraq. They were asked if they’d had contact with any detainees, or visited any interrogation cell. Rod Barton answered yes, and that he had reported suspected abuse. He also said he’d been personally involved in interviewing a senior Iraqi detained at Camp Cropper. This time the Department took him seriously and he was called to give testimony to an internal Defence inquiry. Three weeks later Defence Minister Robert Hill told the Parliament that Australia did not interrogate prisoners. (...) What did you think when the Defence Minister Robert Hill said that no Australians were involved in interrogations?

RB: Well, I was quite annoyed about this. I immediately phoned up the Department and reported that I was annoyed, that I’d provided testimony and that the Department’s response was, “Well, we regard that you did interviews and not interrogations.” (...) I said, “Well, you tell me the difference?” “An interview is between equals, and someone was brought to me in an orange jumpsuit with a guard with a gun standing behind him and, all right, you can call it what you wish, but I think it’s misleading. I believe it was an interrogation.” The Iraqis regarded it as interrogation (...). The Americans I think regarded it as interrogation. It wasn’t just a simple interview, although, of course, I didn’t pull any fingernails out, and we had appropriate breaks and so on, but I said to them, “You just tell me the difference, but I think it’s misleading to say that no Australians involved. I was involved.” (...) I didn’t know what Australians had been involved when I left, but I had since discovered – because I’d been back to Iraq of course – (...)that there were other Australians involved in investigations, and so (...) our investigations continued, talking to prisoners. (...)

LJ: The most disturbing entry in Rod Barton’s Baghdad diary is from 2 February 2004. It simply reports: “Azmirli dies at weekend.” Mohammed Hamdi Azmirli was a senior Iraqi scientist held at Camp Cropper.

RB: I was told, I recall, that this was due to a brain tumor. At the time I sort of accepted that, but later on when I returned to Australia I read a report in the press about an autopsy had been done on this very prisoner, and this autopsy had shown that the prisoner had died of a brain damage due to a beating; that he had a fractured skull, broken jaw and so on.

Now, I had suspicions that this person had actually been beaten to death in the prison. Now, I wasn’t sure of that, but it was something that I felt should be investigated, and I also reported that to the defence department. Someone was going to get back to me. They haven’t done so far, but I’m waiting for the call.

LJ: In September last year Rod Barton was asked to return to Baghdad.

RB: I was contacted by Charles Duelfer, the head of the Iraq Survey Group, asking whether I’d come back, that he needed people, he needed experienced people, and he said that he is absolutely doing his own thing now, and no-one influences him, and he’s doing an honest report, he told me. And he said “I’d like you to come back and help put the report together,” and he said “If you don’t believe me, talk to some of the others,” which is what I did, I contacted some of my colleagues.

LJ: Like the British colleague who’d resigned with you?

RB: Yes, and he’d returned and I spoke to him and I was reassured. So I was quite happy at that stage to go back to Baghdad and help put the report together. I think it’s a good report; as objective and it’s as neutral as one can be in this sort of thing.

LJ: And (...) came to the conclusion that there were -

RB: Came to the final conclusion that there were no weapons of mass destruction, there had not been weapons of mass destruction since 1991, and there were no programs to produce such weapons.

LJ: Having come to that conclusion, what was then done with the scientists who were being held at Camp Cropper, to both give you information about weapons programs or, indeed, held there on the belief that they were precisely the people who were producing the weapons?

RB: Well, the scientists and the military people who were involved in those weapons are still at Cropper.

LJ: Do you still believe they should be released?

RB: Yes, yes. These people, they may not be the most desirable people in the world, but they haven’t done anything wrong, at least internationally. They may have been involved in production of biological or chemical weapons, or even nuclear weapons, in the past, but under international law, as long as they weren’t involved in the use of these weapons, that’s not illegal. (...) And I have to remind you that the United States itself had a chemical and biological weapons program at one stage, and there are still people around who were involved in those programs.

LJ: So they were arrested on the basis of the fact that they were involved, currently involved, in weapons programs, and now we know that there are no weapons programs, they’re still there?

RB: That’s right, yes.

LJ: Are people like that still being interviewed? I mean, when you went back, are there still – or what is their situation?

RB: Well, you have to understand that some of these people now have been in prison, I guess, getting on for a year and a half. Some of them haven’t been asked questions for months. I mean, all the information they’re gonna get out of these people they’ve obtained, so why are they still keeping people there? I think a lot of them should be released. But getting them out is a lot more difficult than getting them in.

LJ: Why’s that? Explain that difference?

RB: I guess this goes back to some people in the CIA; “If we release them that shows that we were wrong, you know, there weren’t any WMD programs” and, of course, not everyone has accepted that within some of the agencies. (...) I was in Langley in October, and there were certainly some indications amongst some of the people there, not all, that they weren’t wrong, that we were wrong, in other words, the ISG was wrong, and that the CIA is still right.

LJ: What do you personally take from it?

RB: Well, of course, I was wrong too, but I guess, at least, you know, in the end we know the answers, I think, and I understand why I was wrong. I should explain there were some things (...) we interpreted things in certain ways, but because Iraq had lied to us – and I can give you the example with the anthrax. Iraq said that they destroyed the anthrax at the facility where they produced it, a place called Al Hakam. Now, we knew that that could not be true, and we interpreted that as saying, “Well, they’ve perhaps have still kept it,” you know, they kept it. But what really happened to the anthrax is they moved it around the county on semitrailers, all the way during the Gulf War in 1991, and it was still in the trailers in July 1991, and the trailers had finished up in a place called Radinawiyah, which is south of Baghdad, and the order came at the time to destroy the agent, so they destroyed it. Unfortunately, it was right outside a palace, and they decontaminated the containers and they poured the anthrax onto the ground. Now, when it came to confessing to the United Nations that they had done this, Dr Taha, who was head of the program, could not now confess this because she would be more in trouble with Saddam for pouring this out (...). So to protect herself from the wrath of Saddam, she lied to the United Nations, and lied to us. So we knew that there was a lie, but we jumped to the wrong conclusions. So we, ourselves, had a lesson to learn there, that we should be more objective, we should be more critical of everything they say.

LJ: Three months ago the Department of Defence in Canberra received a thank you note from Charles Duelfer, Special Advisor to the director of the CIA.

Quote: “To express my gratitude for the support you provided in the person of Mr Rod Barton. Mr Barton’s unique experience and talents have been extremely valuable in producing a credible and balanced report.” Do you feel that it’s ended? Do you have closure on this?

RB: Yes, I think so. I think we know the answers. I think I have closure. I mean, that’s a small satisfaction. I mean, I still feel concerned about what’s happened in Iraq, and about those people who are still in prison, and the casualties along the way; not only on the Iraq side, but on our side as well – David Kelly, I mentioned earlier on. So yeah, it’s been a long journey, but I feel I’m at the end of this and I can move on to something else now.