Rod Barton

When did the rationale for the Iraq War – which began in 2003 and still rumbles today – go from being a mistake, to a self-deception, to an outright lie? When did it dawn on the Bush Jr administration and its key allies in London and Canberra that the ostensible reason for the invasion of Iraq had disappeared, probably literally, under the sands of Mesopotamia? By the time of the invasion, Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed no weapons of mass destruction that could threaten another country. The Iraqi dictator may have desired such weapons, but a combination of international sanctions and the mere fear of retribution thwarted his plans.

Early in his book, Rod Barton describes his reaction to two events that showed what kind of intelligence officer he would become. In the late 1970s he was asked by the Joint Intelligence Organisation to deter-mine the winners and losers in a nuclear exchange between the superpowers. But how, he asked, could this be done without taking into account environmental, political, medical and psychological factors? The other occasion was when Barton contradicted American military intelligence assertions that ‘yellow rain’ falling on Hmong tribesmen in Laos in the late 1970s was a Soviet-supplied chemical warfare agent. His own investigations showed it was bee droppings. Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser backed his findings despite pressure from US Secretary of State Alexander Haig to endorse the American version. Barton’s view prevailed.