The Road to Iraq: What the Spies Got Wrong (Ep 5)
5/17/202654 min
Who was “Curveball”? Why did Colin Powell rely so heavily on flawed intelligence in his presentation to the UN? And how did this set the tone for the opposition to war?
As David and Gordon reach the penultimate episode in their series on Iraq WMD, they discuss how things could have gone so badly wrong.
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First 90 secondsDavid McCloskey· Host0:00
[upbeat music] For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter, and discounted books, join the Declassified Club at therestisclassified.com. [upbeat music] Why were MI6 and the CIA so quick to believe an unreliable source? And could anyone back in 2003 have stopped the march toward war? Well, welcome to The Rest is Classified. I'm David McCloskey.
Gordon Corera· Host0:40
And I'm Gordon Corera.
David McCloskey· Host0:42
And Gordon, we are on the fifth episode of this journey into the story around Iraq WMD. Last time, we, we spoke a lot about how both governments in Washington and London set about making the public case for war, and in particular, how the UK government put out this dossier to, as sort of a compendium of its best possible information on Iraq's WMD programs, how internally there was a tremendous amount of consternation at the working levels of British intelligence around the quality of that information, but how when that dossier came out, Prime Minister Blair's judgments about WMD were, were very clear. It was beyond doubt that Saddam had WMD. And we left off last time with the US