NYT: Tyler Drumheller, Ex-C.I.A. Official Who Disputed Bush, Dies at 63

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/10/us/tyler-drumheller-ex-cia-official-who-disputed-bush-dies-at-63.html

AUG. 9, 2015

Tyler Drumheller, Ex-C.I.A. Official Who Disputed Bush, Dies at 63

By SAM ROBERTS

Tyler S. Drumheller, a former senior American intelligence official who publicly asserted that President George W. Bush's administration had knowingly hyped fabricated evidence of Iraq's arsenal of biological weapons to justify the 2003 invasion, died on Aug. 2 in Falls Church, Va. He was 63.

The cause was complications of pancreatic cancer, his wife, Linda Drumheller, said.

Three years after the invasion and after his retirement from the Central Intelligence Agency, where he had been chief of the European division, Mr. Drumheller took the unusual step of publicly saying [1] that he had warned his superiors that an Iraqi defector who claimed Iraq was equipped with mobile, lethal germ factories was mentally unstable.

Mr. Drumheller also said that before the war, one of Saddam Hussein's own ministers had confided to American intelligence that the Iraqis had not stockpiled weapons of mass destruction.

"So in the fall of 2002, before going to war, we had it on good authority from a source within Saddam's inner circle that he didn't have an active program for weapons of mass destruction?" Ed Bradley asked Mr. Drumheller on the CBS News program "60 Minutes" in 2006. [2]

"Yes," he replied.

When Colin L. Powell, then the secretary of state, repeated the claim [3] before the United Nations Security Council, Mr. Drumheller recalled in a 2007 interview [4] with the English-language website of the German news weekly Der Spiegel, "the first thing I thought, having worked in the government all my life, was that we probably gave Powell the wrong speech. We checked our files and found that they had just ignored it.

"The policy was set," he said in the interview. [5] "The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy."

"The agency is not blameless and no president on my watch has had a spotless record when it comes to the C.I.A.," he said. "But never before have I seen the manipulation of intelligence that has played out since Bush took office. As chief of Europe, I had a front-row seat from which to observe the unprecedented drive for intelligence justifying the Iraq war."

An Iraqi chemical engineer who defected to Germany in the late 1990s -- appropriately code-named Curveball -- later admitted that he fabricated the story while seeking asylum. No mobile laboratories were ever discovered.

A presidential commission on intelligence lapses concluded in 2005 that warnings about his reliability had been expressed to senior C.I.A. officials, but had not been conveyed to Mr. Powell.

In his 2007 book, [6] "At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the C.I.A.," George J. Tenet, the agency's former director, denied that Mr. Drumheller had personally warned him that the Iraqi defector was not credible.

But Mr. Tenet did not address Mr. Drumheller's other assertion: that the Iraqi foreign minister, Naji Sabri, had secretly reported that Iraq was not pursuing any mass-destruction weaponry programs.

Tyler Scott Drumheller was born in Biloxi, Miss., on April 12, 1952. His father, Paul, was an Air Force chaplain. His mother, the former Jean Ryan, was a nurse.

He graduated from the University of Virginia in 1974 with a bachelor's degree in history and studied Chinese at Georgetown University. In 1979, he was hired by the C.I.A. While working there he met and married Linda Blocher, who was working as a secretary.

In addition to his wife, survivors include their daughter, Livia Phillips; his sister, Alecia Ball; and a grandson.

In his 26 years with the agency in Africa and Europe, nobody would have mistaken Mr. Drumheller, who was roly-poly and rumpled, for James Bond. After operating under cover for most of his career, his public profile rose with his retirement.

He wrote a book, "On the Brink: An Insider's Account of How the White House Compromised American Intelligence," in 2006 with Elaine Monaghan.

He also figured more recently in congressional inquiries into emails [7] between Hillary Rodham Clinton, when she was secretary of state, and Sidney Blumenthal, an adviser. Mr. Blumenthal was also advising a group of businessmen, including Mr. Drumheller, who were exploring profit-making ventures in Libya.

In the Der Spiegel interview, Mr. Drumheller, who led the European division while the agency was abducting suspected terrorists, did not pretend that even American spies always kept their white hats clean.

"From the perspective of the White House, it was smart to blur the lines about what was acceptable and what was not in the war on terrorism," he said. "It meant that whenever someone was overzealous in some dark interrogation cell, President Bush and his entourage could blame someone else.

"The rendition teams are drawn from paramilitary officers who are brave and colorful," he continued. "They are the men who went into Baghdad before the bombs and into Afghanistan before the army. If they didn't do paramilitary actions for a living, they would probably be robbing banks."

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/22/washington/22intel.html

[2] http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/a-spy-speaks-out-50110420/

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/world/threats-responses-security-council-powell-un-speech-presents-case-show-iraq-has.html

[4] http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/the-real-story-of-curveball-how-german-intelligence-helped-justify-the-us-invasion-of-iraq-a-542840.html

[5] http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/spiegel-interview-with-cia-s-former-europe-director-we-probably-gave-powell-the-wrong-speech-a-462782.html

[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/28/books/28kaku.html

[7] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/house-benghazi-committee-examines-the-origins-of-emails-to-clinton.html