HUMINT in Iraq before the war

Remember all the stories about how we lacked HUMINT (human intelligence) from Iraq?  And that made it so hard for the Bush administration to get accurate information about the Iraqi WMDs that turned out not to exist?

Well, Sidney Blumenthal in the article I quoted in the previous post (Bush's war on professionals Salon 01/05/06), talks about James Risen's just-released book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration:

Startlingly, Risen reports that on the eve of war, the CIA knew the U.S. had no proof of weapons of mass destruction, the casus belli, the justification for preemptive attack. The agency had recruited an Arab-American woman living in Cleveland, Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad, as a secret agent to travel to Baghdad to spy on her brother, Saad Tawfiq, an electrical engineer supposedly at the center of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program. Once there, she won his trust and he confided there was no program. He urged her to carry the message back to the CIA. Upon her return, she was debriefed and the CIA filed the report in a black hole. It turned out that she was one of some 30 Iraqis who had been recruited to travel to Iraq to contact weapons experts there. Risen writes, "All of them … had said the same thing. They all reported to the CIA that the scientists had said that Iraq's programs to develop nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons had long since been abandoned."

Not willing to contradict the administration line, CIA officials withheld this information from the National Intelligence Estimate issued a month after Alhaddad's visit to Baghdad. The NIE stated conclusively that Iraq "is reconstituting its nuclear program." Risen writes: "From his home in Baghdad in February 2003, Saad Tawfiq watched Secretary of State Colin Powell's televised presentation to the United Nations about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. As Powell dramatically built the American case for war, Saad sank further and further into frustration and despair. They didn't listen. I told them there were no weapons."

When CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin raised questions about the fabled aluminum tubes that were supposedly a critical element of Saddam's nuclear program, Tenet waved McLaughlin's doubt aside. Skepticism was banished. When David Kay, chief of the Iraq Survey Group, discovered there were no WMD, he met with the ever-faithful [CIA director George] Tenet, who told him: "I don't care what you say. You will never convince me they didn't have chemical weapons." (my emphasis)

Say what? Thirty operatives sent in to contact Iraqis in the weapons programs?

So it seems that we weren't entirely lacking in HUMINT in Iraq.  But there seems to have been something lacking on this end.  It sounds like integrity was more the critically lacking element here.