Home > US intelligence couldn’t spot insurgent campaign
NEW YORK: US intelligence failures produced "a nasty surprise" by not spotting that Saddam Hussein had dispatched trucks and buses filled with a large paramilitary force to wage an insurgents’ campaign shortly after the war began in Iraq, according to a US Army General who commanded the invasion.
Gen Tommy R Franks also recounts in his new book that much of his certainty that his troops would face attacks by banned weapons "in particular biological or chemical arms" came from conversations with King Abdullah II of Jordan and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. The king cited "reliable intelligence sources," and Mubarak quoted conversations between his officials and Hussein.
The New York Times reported that in his book, American Soldier , which goes on sale on Tuesday, Franks dissects the two combat victories he achieved, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those efforts are studied as much for their swift successes with more agile forces, as for the murky, unstable post-war environments, the paper said.
In passages likely to add kindling to the debate over whether sufficient troops were committed to battle in Iraq and to the continuing post-war operations, Franks writes that several of the evolving campaign concepts written before the war projected a maximum of 250,000 troops at the end of the combat phase and into the post-war mission.
He talks of how swift capture of Baghdad was accomplished with approximately 170,000 conventional ground troops. Among the book’s disclosures is that a US military officer pretended to be an agent for Iraqi intelligence, selling Baghdad fake war plans stamped "Polo Step," which was the name of Franks’ secret war-planning team, the Times says.