In the article, I quote from a memorandum sent to Congress earlier this year by John Loftus, organiser of the annual Intelligence Summit conference, asking for a Congressional inquiry into Mr Gaubatz’s claims and the behaviour of John Negroponte, the former Director of National Intelligence and now deputy Secretary of State. Mr Loftus, who was formerly a lawyer with high security clearance in the Attorney General’s office during the Reagan administration and who for the next 25 years specialised in representing intelligence agents, claims to have extensive access to the covert world. His memorandum, which goes much further than Mr Gaubatz’s claims, presents a shocking and, indeed, terrifying analysis which, although I do not know whether it is true, I think it is important to publicise. I therefore reproduce it here.
Memorandum in Support of Request for Congressional Investigation of John Negroponte,submitted by John Loftus, President the International Intelligence Summit (www.IntelligenceSummit.org)
John Negroponte, recently demoted by President Bush as Director of National Intelligence, has engaged in a systematic attack upon an American charitable organization which specializes in intelligence studies. The Intelligence Summit occasionally researched and debated topics that Mr. Negroponte wished concealed from Congress. Some of these topics are of significant national importance.
For example, at its next conference in March, 2007, the Summit will review evidence concerning Chinese assistance to Saddam’s development of nuclear weapons technology, and the subsequent transfer of Saddam’s WMD technology to Syria and Iran. Mr. Negroponte was negligent in allowing such transfers to occur and has completely abused his authority in attempting to prevent this conference from taking place.
The Intelligence Summit is a small but prestigious non-profit non-partisan educational organization which supports research into intelligence and counter terrorism issues. The results are presented by international experts at unclassified open-source annual conferences open to the press and public. Senior members of the American, British, Indian and Israeli intelligence community serve on its advisory board, www.IntelligenceSummit.org. It is incomprehensible that the Summit has become a target of Mr. Negroponte’s abuse.
This is not the first such instance of abuse, nor is the Intelligence Summit the only victim. Mr. Negroponte is the informal leader of a State Department faction, colloquially known as the ‘Red Team’ because of its support for a dialogue with communist China. This is a laudable goal, but a classified study found that Red Team had ruthlessly and systematically suppressed any negative or contrary information about China, with the result that for ten years they completely missed a major expansion of the People’s Liberation Army, a most significant intelligence failure.
The Intelligence Summit is exploring a related hypothesis: that in return for increased access to Arab oil, the Chinese Army created an international consortium of rogue states to develop the Islamic Bomb. Mr. Negroponte apparently ignored the early warnings. When Col. Quaddafi turned over his blueprints for a nuclear warhead, they were written in Chinese. Even more alarming, the IAEA discovered that tens of thousands of advanced P-2 uranium centrifuges had been manufactured in Malaysia, but had gone missing. The Summit now believes that China had arranged this shipment for Iraq.
China, France and Russia enjoyed a special relationship with Saddam Hussein. They were the three principal exporters of Iraqi oil during his regime. Russia had supplied 99% of the chemical and biological weapons acquired by Iraq, and at Russian insistence, Saddam agreed to sell or transfer his CW/BW stockpiles to other Arab states in the weeks and months before the war. However, Saddam decided to retain his nuclear weapons technology. Negroponte was correct that there were no CW and BW stockpiles inside Iraq, but he was utterly wrong concerning Saddam’s nuclear weapons technology.
It should be noted that the CIA had a mole inside Saddam’s cabinet who insisted that there were no active WMD programs. However, Saddam had a restricted group to review nuclear development, which excluded the mole. We know this with certainty because Saddam tape recorded his discussion about nuclear development and the voiceprints of the participants were confirmed by NSA.
At the 2006 Summit, a tape recording of Saddam discussing his nuclear weapons technology was presented to the public. The tape clearly shows Saddam discussing a progress report on a laser enrichment system for uranium, one of the more advanced methods to make a nuclear bomb. This nuclear technology tape had sat untranslated in a Kuwaiti warehouse along with thousands of shelf feet of captured Intelligence files. Mr. Negroponte had decided to give them a low priority until the 2006 Summit revealed their importance.
Mr. Negroponte falsely asserted to the press that the nuclear tape was old news, decade old material already known to the intelligence community from a program long closed down. ‘Nothing new here’ became his standard response.
In fact, the names of the two Iraqi individuals in charge of Saddam’s uranium enrichment were not previously known either to the UN weapons inspectors or to the intelligence community. Nor were these discussions merely old news about abandoned programs. Because the year 2001 was mentioned in the past tense on the tapes, it is clear that Saddam’s nuclear progress report meeting took place in 2002 —early 2003, just on the eve of war [my emphasis].
The authenticity of this tape is beyond dispute. After the 2006 Summit, the President overruled Mr. Negroponte and ordered all such tapes translated on an accelerated basis. To Mr. Negroponte’s dismay, other nuclear tapes began to emerge. The amount and detail of Saddam’s nuclear weapons technology was so advanced that the newly translated tapes had to be taken off the public website. Saddam’s regime possessed nuclear bomb technology so advanced that it could not be discussed without risk of harm to national security. Clearly, someone had given Saddam the secrets behind the atomic bomb.
The Intelligence Summit is continuing its research into Saddam’s nuclear past and has developed the following hypothesis. In 1972, Saddam chose Chirac as his first nuclear technology provider, and later boasted that he had funded Chirac’s entire political career. After Israel destroyed the French built Osirak reactor, Saddam demanded that Chirac (who had been elected President of France in 1995) provide Iraq with sufficient uranium ore to supply a massive underground nuclear weapons program. The French intelligence service arranged for French companies in Burkina-Faso, Chad, and Niger to export substantial quantities of yellow cake to Iraq.
The British Secret Intelligence Service soon uncovered the French transfer of uranium ore from Africa to Iraq. Some sources allege that the SIS has an agent or mole inside French intelligence, and that SIS agents then posed as uranium brokers or middlemen in each of the three African countries to corroborate the mole’s information. Once the uranium sale to Iraq was confirmed, the SIS informed the CIA (but withheld the sourcing data).
The French liaison to the CIA immediately denounced the British report as tenuous and unsourced. (Also Negroponte’s position). Without disclosing its sensitive sources to the skeptical CIA, the SIS agreed to water down its report, saying that Saddam was only attempting to purchase uranium ore, when in fact the British knew that he had already succeeded. Shortly afterward, the French intelligence service used one of their former agents to plant forged documents on the Italian Secret Service in order to further discredit reports of African ore sales to Iraq. It should be noted that several French companies, particularly in Niger, had substantial control over the mining of uranium ore in Africa.
The French disinformation strategy successfully deceived US Ambassador Joseph Wilson. After Wilson’s reports, the CIA became even more skeptical, but the British were quite insistent that their information was fully authenticated. The British report was later included as the famous thirteen words among the President’s justifications for war against Iraq.
(Later, an independent British commission headed by Lord Butler reviewed SIS’s sources on WMD in Iraq, and concluded that SIS had inflated the data about Saddam’s chemical and biological weapons, but that their conclusions about his nuclear weapons program were more than fully justified by the evidence. To this day it is the official position of the British government that Saddam was indeed engaged in developing nuclear weapons and that he continued in his attempts to do so right up to the eve of war. )
If the British were right, then there had to be substantial uranium enrichment and nuclear weapons development sites hidden somewhere inside Iraq. As soon as US forces entered Iraq, the CIA began searching for Saddam’s nuclear weapons plants. What Mr. Negroponte doe not want Congress to know is that the CIA indeed found all four of Saddam’s nuclear weapons sites, reported the data through inter-agency channels, and that somehow during Mr. Negroponte’s tenure, the most important intelligence data of the Iraq war got ‘lost.’
Saddam’s nuclear weapons sites were found by Mr. David Gaubatz a member of the CIA’s Iraq Survey Group (ISG). Saddam had constructed four under water warehouses for his nuclear WMD facilities. Coffer dams were constructed along the banks of the Euphrates River, and huge subterranean vaults were excavated. The warehouses were covered with water-proof concrete and then the coffer dams were removed, so that the site appeared to be part of the river.
It should be noted that Saddam was concerned about preventing another Israeli raid which had destroyed his above ground Osirak reactor. The construction of the four underwater facilities was hugely expensive, but the water barrier was extremely effective at preventing the monitoring of radioactive substances. Unlike Osirak, the four under water nuclear sites were almost undetectable. Each of the four was large enough to hold a cascade, or arrayed series of centrifuges for the transformation of uranium gas into weapons grade uranium.
The walls of the WMD warehouses were five feet thick of reinforced concrete, the roofs of each facility were between fifteen and twenty five feet below the surface of the Euphrates river. It would take heavy moving equipment to breach the walls. Although the vaults were not opened, and no core samples were taken, Gaubatz and his ISG staff already had an idea of the contents. Their medical files note that each of the ISG members who had visited the four warehouse sites had been exposed to high levels of radiation.
What Gaubatz did not know at the time was that none, absolutely none of his ISG reports about Saddam’s WMD warehouses were ever reaching the CIA. Not one of them even reached Washington. Years later Gaubatz was listening to a television report by the President’s National Security Advisor who reported that the US Government had never found even a trace of any WMD hidden in Iraq. An astonished Gaubatz tried to find out what had happened to his reports but got nowhere.
After Gaubatz appeared at the 2006 Intelligence Summit, the CIA opened an investigation into how such critical information could simply have disappeared for more than three years. In 2003, Gaubatz reports had gone through secure COMINT channels to the major American intelligence computer in Saudi Arabia. There, the trail went cold.
At the time, the Saudi government had ordered the evacuation of all American personnel and the closing down of all American bases. In their haste to leave, it is entirely possible that someone erased the central computer before ensuring that all the files had been copied and forwarded to the appropriate agencies back home. As incredible as this may sound, the CIA believes that stupid human error is the most likely explanation. Such things happen in the fog of war with regularity.
There is however, a remote possibility that ISG’s reports were sabotaged. One member of Negroponte’s Red Team subsequently plead guilty to espionage and transmitting American secrets to communist China. The Chinese government, it is submitted, had the greatest motive for suppressing evidence concerning Saddam’s acquisition of nuclear weapons technology. In view of what happened next, it is reasonable for Congress to give intense scrutiny to the breakdown in ISG communications during the Iraq war.
When US government officials belatedly returned to the four underwater WMD sites, they were horrified to learn that each had been systematically looted during the previous three years. The Summit has been able to make an educated guess where Saddam’s nuclear stores ended up. In 2002, an allied intelligence agency surreptitiously recorded a North Korean discussion about what to do with the Iraqi nuclear scientists if Saddam was deposed. The discussion took place in Damascus, Syria. A simple look at a highway map shows that the highway from the Euphrates to Al Qaim Syria was the fastest route to move large quantities of uranium ore, drums of feedstock gas, and thousands of P-2 centrifuge parts.
It is not widely know, but open sources identify that the US Government has a satellite capable of detecting the unique frequencies generated by high speed uranium centrifuges. The satellite confirms that uranium centrifuges are operating in Syria. Syria has no known nuclear program, not even a power plant. Nor does it have a natural supply of uranium ore. Why then, are the Syrians running nuclear centrifuges?
It is reasonable to suspect that all of Saddam’s nuclear research, scientists and equipment have been relocated to his fellow Baath party members in the nation of Syria. Indeed there is no other explanation to explain the disappearance of what Saddam himself talked about on his tapes; a massive and robust program to make an atomic bomb.
A significant percentage of the intelligence community disagrees with Mr. Negroponte’s benign view of Chinese intervention in the Middle East. The opposition ‘Blue Team’ if you will, uses the Intelligence Summit as its outlet. The Blue team theorizes the existence of an international consortium of rogue states under Chinese direction. Each state has a different piece of the nuclear puzzle: yellowcake enrichment in Iraq (now in Syria), missile production in Iran, and warhead production in North Korea. Films of military parades reveal that the mock warheads on Iranian missiles are exact duplicates of the North Korean nuclear warhead.
If the blue team is right, then Iran has distracted the IAEA into focusing attention on Tehran’s primitive P-1 centrifuges, while the advanced P-2 centrifuges in Syria have been producing weapons grade uranium to be loaded onto Iranian missiles carrying North Korean warheads.. There is circumstantial evidence to back up the satellite data. Iranian scientists attend the North Korean nuclear tests, and North Korean nuclear experts hold meetings in Damascus.
If the Blue team is correct, then Tehran may already have nuclear warheads and are merely waiting to perfect their multiple stage orbital missiles. If Mr. Negroponte’s Red Team is correct, then why have they gone to such extremes to stifle the debate and shut down the Intelligence Summit?
On the eve of the 2006 Intelligence Summit, Mr. Negroponte’s office circulated a memo to every intelligence agency warning them that the Summit had received a donation from an Israeli with alleged ‘ties’ to the Russian Mafia. It was of course, utterly false. Mr. Michael Cherney is an Israeli billionaire who donates frequently to organizations which combat terrorism. Israeli courts have determined that he was the victim of the Russian Mafia, and that documents circulated against him are a hoax. The Israeli opinion has been confirmed by Russia, Great Britain and several other nations.
In May 2006, the Intelligence Summit made an attempt at rapprochement with Mr. Negroponte, explained the hoax against Mr. Cherney and offered numerous corroborating documents on our public website. In an effort to let bygones be bygones, we offered to sever all ties with Michael Cherney. If Mr. Negroponte, or any other government agency seriously thought there was any possibility that these charges were true, then we asked them to please inform the Summit by June 30, 2006 in order to spare the charity and Mr. Cherney any further embarrassment.
Not a single US agency objected to the Intelligence Summit’s continued acceptance of charitable donations from Mr. Cherney. Mr. Negroponte’s office made no objection at the time but cynically waited six months later, when on the eve of the conference he sent out yet another memo, reiterating charges which he knew to be false. As a direct result of Mr. Negroponte’s well delayed stab in the back, the Intelligence Summit has lost speakers, attendee, exhibitors volunteers and funding.
Indeed, had it not been for the stubborn generosity of Mr. Cherney, the Intelligence Summit would have collapsed. Not many individuals are willing to risk their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor in the cause of freedom. It is our hope that Mr. Cherney will be the first witness called before Congress to receive the thanks of a grateful nation.
Because Cherney chose to withstand Mr. Negroponte’s wilful and malicious smear campaign, the Summit has been able to complete a large portion of its work. The next Summit will take place in March 5-7 in St. Petersburg, Florida. More and more citizens are coming forward to re-examine the pieces of the WMD puzzle. Among other things, Mr. Gaubatz will report his latest news from Iraq.
It is certainly a tragedy that Mr. Negroponte would attack a charity simply because it attempted to host a debate on an important point of publicly policy. It is even more of a tragedy that for nearly four years, Mr. Negroponte’s stubborn unwillingness to entertain other points of view may have contributed to the withholding of key information from Congress, the American people, and world opinion. The truth is neither left nor right, but forward. It is time for Congress to put partisan differences aside and move forward to uncovering the truth.
We respectfully request that Congress initiate an investigation into these matters.
Of course, with the exception of a couple of reports about Mr Gaubatz which were ignored, none of this has been reported in the US media. As I say in my article, none of us can know whether these claims are true; but in view of Mr Gaubatz’s role and the testimony he has offered, surely there should at least be an inquiry? And surely, given such claims by a former agent for the covert world about a chronic political failure to act upon intelligence, the press would normally be crawling all over this and clamouring for just such an inquiry?
But when it comes to Iraq, the western media behave collectively out of character. There is no openness to any facts that challenge the ‘line’. There is a mindset, so powerful as to amount to a kind of collective brainwashing, that it is been ‘proved’ that there were no WMD in Saddam’s Iraq. Any claim to the contrary, however authoritative or persuasive, is therefore brushed aside. Even the brief public appearance on an official US website of the Saddam tape transcripts referred to in the memorandum above — in one of which Saddam could be heard talking in 2002-2003 about his ongoing nuclear programme — was referred to only in passing by the New York Times in a report whose incoherence managed to bury this explosive revelation altogether. The docile US media, dependent as it is on government sources and handouts, is all too easily intimidated or bought off by pressure from a myriad different sources which all have their own conflicting reasons to suppress such politically damaging revelations. Too many important reputations in the media now rest on the ruthless suppression of the faintest possibility that they might have been wrong.
But the stakes here are just too high. Such silence means that, if all this is true, America — and the rest of the free world —remains unaware of the potentially cataclysmic consequences of this incompetence. We are thus unable to grasp the enormity, scope, and complexity of what we face and to take the appropriate measures to defend ourselves against it. It is to be hoped that, with the publication today of this material, the US and UK media will finally be stirred into asking some much-needed questions. Our future may depend on it.
