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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Seymour M. Hersh's March 31st article on the Niger uranium controversy
On the night of June 18th, Task Force 20, an American Special Operations team stationed in Iraq, expanded its operations dozens of miles inside Syria. Military intelligence had observed large numbers of cars and trucks speeding toward the border, and senior officers suspected that the vehicles were carrying fleeing members of the Iraqi leadership. Communications intercepts had indicated that there were more Syrian soldiers congregated along the border than usual, including some officers. The military concluded, according to a senior Administration official, that "something down there was going on." Two days earlier, one of Saddam Hussein's closest aides, Abid Hamid Mahmud, had been captured, and told his interrogators that he and Saddam's two sons had sought refuge in Syria but were turned back. Although the Syrian government denied knowledge of the brothers' whereabouts, the military was now ready to cross the border to stop any future flight attempts.
Sometime after midnight, Army helicopters and Bradley Fighting Vehicles attacked two groups of cars heading into Syria, triggering enormous explosions and fireballs that lit up the night sky. A gas station and nearby homes were destroyed. Task Force 20 sped across the border into Syria. Five Syrian guards were injured and flown to Iraq in American helicopters for medical treatment, and several other Syrians were seized, handcuffed, and detained before being released.
Pentagon officials subsequently praised the nighttime mission. "I'm confident we had very good intelligence," Air Force General Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a Pentagon news conference on June 24th. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told reporters, "There were reasons, good reasons, to believe that the vehicles that were violating the curfew that existed in that area were doing it for reasons other than normal commerce." Asked if he believed that senior Iraqi leaders had been killed in the raid, Rumsfeld said, "We're trying to find out."
In fact, according to current and former American military and diplomatic officials, the operation was a fiasco in which as many as eighty people--occupants of the cars and trucks as well as civilians living nearby--were killed. The vehicles, it turned out, were being used to smuggle gasoline. The Syrian government said little publicly about the violation of its sovereignty, even when the Pentagon delayed the repatriation of the injured Syrian border guards--reporters were told that the guards had not been fully interrogated--for ten days.
Weeks later, questions about the raid remained: Why had American forces crossed the border? And why had the Syrian response been so muted? An American consultant who recently returned from Iraq said, "I don't mind so much what we did, but it's the incompetence with which we did it." A senior adviser to the Pentagon noted that the people who were killed had "put themselves into the gray area" by smuggling fuel across the border. "The troops were trying to work with actionable intelligence," the official said. "You might make the same mistake." This month, two retired veterans of the C.I.A.'s clandestine service, Vincent Cannistraro and Philip Giraldi, who now consult on intelligence issues, noted in a newsletter for their private clients that the attacks had been based on "fragmentary and ambiguous" information and had led to increased tension between Rumsfeld and the C.I.A. director, George Tenet.
Tenet's involvement was significant. American intelligence and State Department officials have told me that by early 2002 Syria had emerged as one of the C.I.A.'s most effective intelligence allies in the fight against Al Qaeda, providing an outpouring of information that came to an end only with the invasion of Iraq....
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