Iraq Confidential: The Untold Story of the Intelligence Conspiracy to Undermine the UN and Overthrow Saddam Hussein

Scott Ritter is the straight-talking former marine officer who the CIA wants to silence. After the 1991 Gulf War, Ritter helped lead the UN weapons inspections of Iraq and found himself at the center of a dangerous game between the Iraqi and US regimes.

As Ritter reveals in this explosive book, Washington was only interested in disarmament as a tool for its own agenda. Operating in a fog of espionage and counter-espionage, Ritter and his team were determined to find out the truth about Iraq’s WMD. The CIA were equally determined to stop them. The truth, as we now know, was that Iraq was playing a deadly game of double-bluff, and actually had no WMD. But to have revealed this would have derailed America’s drive for regime change.

Iraq Confidential charts the disillusionment of a staunch patriot who came to realize that his own government sought to undermine effective arms control in the Middle East. Ritter shows us a world of deceit and betrayal in which nothing is as it seems. A host of characters from Mossad, MI6 and the CIA pepper this powerful narrative, which contains revelations that will permanently affect the ongoing debates about Iraq.

Scott Ritter was the UN's top weapons inspector in Iraq between 1991 and 1998. Before working for the UN he served as a captain in the US marines and as a ballistic missile adviser to General Schwarzkopf in the first Gulf War. He opposed the build-up for war in 2003, claiming that Iraq had been effectively disarmed. Events have vindicated him in this respect.

Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist currently writing for the New Yorker. In his long and distinguished career he has been the first to expose many of the major scandals in US foreign policy, from the May Lai massacre in Vietnam to Abu Ghraib.