Washington – On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile “biological laboratories.”
He declared, “We have found the weapons of mass destruction.”
The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed evidence that it was not true.
A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq – not made public until now – had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president’s statement.
The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped “secret” and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories.
The authors of the reports were nine U.S. and British civilian experts – scientists and engineers with extensive experience in all the technical fields involved in making bioweapons – who were dispatched to Baghdad by the Defense Intelligence Agency for an analysis of the trailers.
The technical team’s findings had no apparent impact on the intelligence agencies’ public statements on the trailers. A day after the team’s report was transmitted to Washington – May 28, 2003 – the CIA publicly released its first formal assessment of the trailers, reflecting the views of its Washington analysts. That white paper, which also bore the Defense Intelligence Agency seal, contended that U.S. officials were “confident” that the trailers were used for “mobile biological weapons production.”
But the survey group’s final report in September 2004 said the trailers were were “almost certainly intended” for making hydrogen for weather balloons.
