Mystery Solved

So, that's what was going on in Powell's intercepts.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Monday, March 13, 2006, at 3:48 PM ET

One of the great mysteries of the Iraq war has been solved. The puzzler goes back to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's now-notorious briefing before the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, the one where he laid out the best case he could muster for the claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. In retrospect, the case was a shambles; even at the time, much of it seemed dubious. But there was one very persuasive section—playbacks of intercepted phone conversations between Iraqi military officers that suggested they were hiding WMD from the U.N. inspectors.

The first of these tapes, from Nov. 26, 2002, caught an Iraqi colonel and general talking about a suspected weapons site that the inspectors would be visiting the following day. The general said: "I'll come see you in the morning. I'm worried you could have something left." The colonel replied, "We evacuated everything. We don't have anything left."