June 2003: Plame Wilson, Other CIA Analysts Wonder if Iraq Didn’t Deceive US into Believing It Possessed WMD

Writing in 2007, CIA analyst Valerie Plame Wilson, who works with the issue of Iraq’s WMD, will recall that many of her colleagues now feel “bewilderment over why we weren’t finding any WMD caches at all.” As more and more evidence accumulates that Iraq never had the wide array of WMD stockpiles that the Bush administration has alleged for so long, she begins to experience “a sinking feeling in my stomach that Saddam [Hussein] had pulled off one of the greatest intelligence deceptions of all time: he had made the world believe he had significant stashes of WMD that he would use, if threatened, when in fact, he had nothing” (see January 28, 2004). [Wilson, 2007, pp. 153-154]