Tyler Drumheller

CIA career

His career spanned more than 25 years during which he served as the chief of the agency's largest field office, including time as the head of covert actions in Europe, and worked as a senior operations officer in other regions of the world. During that time, he claimed to have been skeptical of the Bush administration’s claims that intelligence analysis showed Iraq was developing weapon of mass destruction (WMD).

Activities in retirement

Drumheller retired from the CIA in 2005 and moved to the nebulous world of private intelligence consulting. He started his own firm, Tyler Drumheller LLC based in Washington, DC.

At the Beginning of 2006 Drumheller claimed the CIA had credible sources discounting some weapon of mass destruction claims made during the Iraq disarmament crisis before the 2003 Invasion of Iraq. According to Drumheller the Bush administration dismissed CIA information which reported Saddam Hussein had no WMD program and used whatever information it could find to justify an invasion of Iraq. The CIA, brokered by the French intelligence service, recruited Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri in Europe during the late summer of 2002. Sabri told the CIA in September that Saddam had no major active weapons of mass destruction programs; they had no fissile material and biological weapons were almost non-existent, although he claimed that there were chemical weapons. This information was then transmitted to the White House, but it was ignored in favor of the information acquired by Germany's intelligence service Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) coming from a source known as Curveball.

He received and discounted documents central to the Niger yellowcake forgery prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. On April 23, 2006, CBS’s “60 Minutes” interviewed Drumheller and he disclosed that the CIA had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam’s foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. He also said that reports about Iraqis buying tons of yellowcake uranium from Niger “didn’t hold together”.

In April 2007, former CIA director George Tenet, who headed the agency under both President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush, took pages in his book ″At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA″ to call out Drumheller for not telling the truth and dismantle his version of the events and singled Drumheller out as untrustworthy.

On September 6, 2007, Sidney Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior advisor to President Bill Clinton, supported Drumheller's account: "Now two former senior CIA officers have confirmed Drumheller's account to me and provided the background to the story of how the information that might have stopped the invasion of Iraq was twisted in order to justify it."

2011, while the Libyan civil war Drumheller, advised former Major General David L. Grange and than CEO of Osprey Global Solutions. Drumheller, Grange and Blumenthal worked on the Libya memos with Cody Shearer, a longtime Clinton family friend and operative — his brother, Derek Shearer, was United States Ambassador to Finland under Bill Clinton and his sister, Brooke Shearer, was married to Clinton State Department official Strobe Talbott, who was in close contact with Blumenthal. Blumenthal provided the than US-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with detailed briefings on events in the Middle East and was running the ad hoc spy ring. In March 2011, Blumenthal sent an email which included "apparently highly sensitive information" to Hillary Clinton with details received from Drumheller, who had spoken with a CIA colleague, mentioning the name of an intelligence source (2012 Benghazi attack).

Drumheller died on August 2, 2015, from pancreatic cancer at the age of 63 in Falls Church, Virginia.