500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars

by Kurt Eichenwald

  Sheikh Mohammed had arrived at the CIA’s premier secret prison.

  • • •

  That same day, Blix and ElBaradei delivered their latest—and what would be their last—formal report on the weapons inspections in Iraq.

  For days, members of the Bush administration had been pushing Blix—sometimes to the point of rudeness—to declare that he had found two types of equipment that violated the requirements imposed by the U.N. on Iraq. But the inspectors believed, at least for now, that the items they had located were insignificant. One, a drone aircraft, was powered by a motorcycle engine and constructed mostly from balsa wood. The second was a cluster bomb, which administration officials maintained was designed to strew smaller bomblets containing biological or chemical material across a large area; the device had been found by the inspectors in an old factory store and appeared to be nothing more than rusting scrap metal. It contained no traces of any life-threatening agents. Neither of these was sufficient—or there simply was not enough information about them—to declare Iraq in breach of its agreements, Blix concluded.

  Before the presentation, Blix and ElBaradei took an elevator to the thirty-eighth floor at the U.N. building, then walked to the office of Kofi Annan, the secretary-general. The three men headed down together to the Security Council chamber. Everyone took a seat at the table and Blix was invited to speak first.

  The inspectors had followed down the leads provided by Western intelligence services, yet made no damning discoveries. There was no evidence to support claims that Iraq was operating mobile weapons labs. Allegations that Saddam maintained underground armament facilities could not be substantiated; sites identified by the West had been inspected and ground-penetrating radar had been employed, to no avail. The Iraqis were demolishing what little material had turned up, including some rockets, engines, and the like.

  “We are not watching the breaking of toothpicks,” Blix said. “Lethal weapons are being destroyed.”

  There was greater cooperation, Blix said, although Iraq’s seriousness of purpose still had to be assessed. The inspectors needed more time, if only to verify whether full disarmament was taking place. “It will not take years, nor weeks, but months,” he said.

  ElBaradei spoke next and ticked off the searches that been conducted for each item supposedly maintained by Iraq. “After three months of intrusive inspections,” he said, “we have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapon program in Iraq.”

  The presentations changed no minds among the Security Council members.

  • • •

  Anonymous attacks against Blix and ElBaradei appeared in news articles worldwide. The New York Times reported that Washington officials were angered that Blix had failed to mention cluster bombs that had been found by the inspectors. A Reuters dispatch said that the White House was annoyed at his failure to disclose the existence of the drone in his presentation. The State Department issued a “fact sheet” falsely claiming that inspectors had concluded that the drone was definitely a violation by Iraq.

  These were the smoking guns, officials maintained, that had been hidden by Blix in his desperation to avoid war. Rarely was it mentioned that both items had been included in a document provided by Blix to the Security Council.

  The effort to publicly undermine ElBaradei’s credibility was spearheaded by the vice president. The supposed nuclear expert, Cheney argued in an appearance on Meet the Press, didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong,” the vice president said. “If you look at the track record of the International Atomic Energy Agency and this kind of issue, especially where Iraq’s concerned, they have consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing.”

  • • •

  Peter Goldsmith, Blair’s attorney general, changed his mind. Britain could lawfully invade Iraq with the Americans after all.

  The dramatic turnaround had been weeks in the making. Just six days earlier, Goldsmith had sent a note to Blair, amending his earlier ruling with waffling, on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand language. The small step struck Blair and his other advisors as a sign that Goldsmith might, if pushed, reverse his original decision. The prime minister went all out: Give a final judgment, he told Goldsmith. And make it explicit, yes or no.

  On March 13, Goldsmith met with Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, with the news that he was reversing himself. “I’ve decided to come down on one side,” the attorney general said: “1441 is sufficient.”

  Resolution 1441 was the declaration approved by the Security Council in November setting out the new requirements for Iraq’s disarmament. One resolution—not two—would carry the day.

  Goldsmith’s new analysis depended on comparing the November resolution with Resolution 687 from 1991, which imposed a cease-fire in the Persian Gulf War if Iraq disarmed. In Resolution 1441, Iraq was declared in breach of Resolution 687—in other words, Goldsmith maintained, Saddam had failed to comply with the terms of the cease-fire. An invasion now would not be an independent event. Instead, it was a resumption of hostilities in the Gulf War.

  “In public, I need to explain my case as strongly and unambiguously as possible,” Goldsmith said. “And I might need to tell the cabinet when it meets on March 17 that the legal issues were finely balanced.”

  Straw disagreed. It would be better to distribute a draft letter from Straw to the relevant committee in Parliament and make it Goldsmith’s official explanation. Delving into a detailed conversation with the cabinet members would be a mistake.

  “You need to be aware, there’s a problem with the cabinet,” Straw said. “They leak everything.”

  • • •

  The following day, an annual awards ceremony took place at the Pentagon. It was a formal affair, held to honor civilian employees who had made exceptional contributions to the mission of the Defense Department.

  Three men selected to receive the Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service wore boutonnieres designating them as the winners. Some of the army’s top brass milled around them, offering congratulations for everything they had done in their technical work with anthrax at the research institute based at Fort Detrick.

  The ceremony began, and a presenter lauded the recipients’ role in helping the United States respond to the threats posed by the deadly bacteria.

  Each of the scientists was handed the award. Bruce Ivins, the mentally unstable researcher who would soon be the prime suspect in the anthrax killings, beamed as he accepted his medal.

  • • •

  Sheikh Mohammed’s cell had no windows, denying him any perceptions of night and day. Bland and uninviting meals were served at ever-changing intervals and the hum of white noise was pumped incessantly through a speaker. Interrogations were conducted irregularly. Eventually, he lost all sense of time—a classic technique designed to throw him off balance.

  This was not what he had expected. When the terrorist mastermind was turned over to the Americans, he proclaimed with cocky self-assurance that he would not speak until he was taken to New York and assigned a lawyer. But there would be no lawyer, no court, no rights. He was now, an interrogator told him, the property of the United States government.

  The smirk stayed on Sheikh Mohammed’s face; he would not reveal anything, he said. Americans were weak and lacked resilience. They wouldn’t do what was necessary to stop jihadists from achieving their goals.

  An interrogator pressed him for information about future attacks. Sheikh Mohammed just smiled.

  “Soon, you will know,” he said.

  The arrogance would not last. In the earliest days, Sheikh Mohammed was subjected to what the interrogation plan called “conditioning techniques.” He was shackled to the ceiling standing up, with his hands handcuffed in front of him; he was left in that position to prevent him from sleeping and was kept awake for more than ninety-six hours. He was nude at all times, except when he was forced by his
chains to stand up; then he was dressed in a diaper so that he didn’t have to be released when he needed to go to the bathroom. His diet was manipulated, with a near-tasteless liquid substituted for his usual meals.

  None of those tactics were used to force him to deliver answers. Instead, by demonstrating that he had no control over his basic needs, they were intended to induce a high state of anxiety in hopes that he would begin to value his own welfare more than the secrets he held.

  The questioning followed the traditional good-cop, bad-cop routine, although the chasm between good and bad was enormous. The gentler portion was handled by Deuce Martinez, a CIA officer who had worked much of his career as a narcotics analyst. Martinez spoke no Arabic and had no background with interrogations, but quickly demonstrated a skill with Sheikh Mohammed that astonished CIA colleagues.

  The two men discussed religion as Martinez fed dates to his subject. The CIA officer listened with seeming compassion when Sheikh Mohammed expressed anguish over the likelihood that he would never see his children again. The terrorist composed poems for Martinez’s wife as a sign of respect; they were sent instead to CIA psychologists for analysis.

  Sheikh Mohammed grew relaxed and almost friendly in Martinez’s presence. He spent time explaining the similarities between Martinez’s Christianity and his own Islamic beliefs.

  “Can’t we get along?” Sheikh Mohammed eventually asked.

  “Isn’t it a little late for that?” Martinez replied.

  A different team replaced Martinez when the time came for rougher treatment. The interrogators began with what they called “corrective techniques”—slapping Sheikh Mohammed in the face and the abdomen, holding his head motionless, and grabbing him when his attention wandered. They escalated to the interrogation plan’s “coercive techniques,” repeatedly throwing him against a false wall; dousing him with water of about fifty degrees; and forcing him into stress positions and cramped confinement. Finally, they pushed the trauma button—waterboarding. During his first month in the Polish secret prison, Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times.

  Before March ended, Sheikh Mohammed began to talk. Much of his information struck interrogators as little more than attempts at deception. But before long, he was divulging details that were confirmed to be true.

  He described the traits and profiles for Western sympathizers that al-Qaeda had begun to seek out as recruits after 9/11, and gave details of how the terror group selected and conducted surveillance of its targets. He exposed active terror plots in America. He said he had been scheming with a man named Sayf al-Rahman Paracha to smuggle explosives into the United States for an attack in New York; as a result, Paracha was named an enemy combatant and his son was arrested. He described how a truck driver in Ohio named Iyman Faris was conspiring to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge; that led to Faris’s arrest and his agreement to act as a double agent for the FBI by sending deceptive e-mail and text messages from a safe house in Virginia to his terrorist commanders.

  Sheikh Mohammed also told his interrogators about a plan to attack Heathrow Airport, but that news was outdated; the British had already caught wind of the threat and averted it by making mass arrests.

  The biggest payoff from questioning Sheikh Mohammed was not a single revelation, but the sheer volume of information that the CIA could use to trick other detainees into spilling their secrets. Sheikh Mohammed, at times, didn’t even realize what he had done. In one instance, he said that he had met three men running al-Qaeda’s project to produce anthrax, identifying one as Yazid Sufaat, who was already in custody. The interrogators thought Sheikh Mohammed revealed the information because he believed—falsely—that Sufaat had told his captors about his work. The CIA then confronted Sufaat, who was so shaken by the discovery of his role that he identified the other two terrorists working on the biological weapons program. They were promptly arrested.

  Over the course of a few months, the leverage against other detainees provided by Sheikh Mohammed’s information played a big part in the agency’s efforts to cripple al-Qaeda’s associated militant network in Southeast Asia, Jemaah Islamiyah. After 9/11, Sheikh Mohammed began to count increasingly on the Asian terrorists for his plots, recruiting Jemaah Islamiyah in an unsuccessful plot to crash a hijacked plane into Library Tower in Los Angeles, as well as to strike targets throughout Asia and Europe. In the course of planning the attacks, Sheikh Mohammed revealed, he had asked an ally named Majid Khan to deliver $50,000 to Jemaah Islamiyah members.

  Unknown to Sheikh Mohammed, Khan had been detained weeks before in Pakistan. CIA interrogators confronted him about the money, and Khan cracked, admitting that he had turned it over to a man he knew only as Zubair. Khan provided a description and phone number for the man, and authorities picked up Zubair a few weeks later.

  Then, during his debriefings, Zubair revealed that he worked directly for Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali. Dubbed by the CIA as “Osama bin Laden of Southeast Asia,” Hambali was one of the most sought-after terrorists in the world; the Bali nightclub bombers had already identified him as a primary director of the attack. And Zubair knew where the terrorist leader was hiding. Hambali was captured by the CIA and Thai authorities at an apartment in Ayutthaya, Thailand; at the time, he was in the final stages of planning attacks on a series of hotels in Bangkok.

  Hambali was Jemaah Islamiyah’s military commander and chief liaison with al-Qaeda. While his capture dealt a severe blow to the Southeast Asian terror group, the CIA wanted to hammer it harder. So the agency went back to Sheikh Mohammed and told him to identify Hambali’s likely successor. He named Hambali’s brother, ‘Abd al-Hadi.

  In short order, the brother was in custody and he, too, was interrogated. He identified a cell of Jemaah Islamiyah terrorists who had been sent by Hambali to Karachi so that they could serve as martyrs in future al-Qaeda operations. When confronted with that information, Hambali confessed—the cell members were being groomed for attacks in the United States involving hijacked airplanes. The instructions to set up the cell, Hambali said, had been transmitted to him by a senior al-Qaeda terrorist—Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. With the new information, authorities took down the terror cell.

  The process had gone full circle—starting with Sheikh Mohammed and ending with the destruction of a terror cell he had helped create. Asia’s worst terrorist group was, at least for a while, left in shambles.

  • • •

  Bush peered out a window on Air Force One as the coastline of Portugal’s Azores Islands came into view. It was March 16, a Sunday, and the president had just flown more than two thousand miles to the idyllic archipelago in the North Atlantic for an emergency summit with the prime ministers of Britain, Spain, and Portugal.

  Hopes that the Security Council would pass a second resolution authorizing the use of military force against Iraq had all but evaporated. Some last-minute diplomatic efforts were brewing—representatives from Chile were still attempting to broker a compromise resolution, but their effort was faltering. There were also rumblings out of the Middle East that other Arab states were negotiating Saddam’s departure from Iraq, but that apparently was all they were—rumblings.

  So instead, Bush called for this meeting in the Azores with three countries that had already committed their support for an Iraqi invasion. He was tired of debate, and done with it. This discussion would not be so much about whether to close the door on more U.N. wrangling, but rather how hard to slam it shut.

  The president’s plane landed at Lajes Field, a military base shared by the air forces of Portugal and America. Other large jets were just off the runway, including a British Airways 777 airliner that had been chartered to carry Tony Blair and a handful of his advisors to the meeting. Air Force One came to a stop and Bush came down the stairs. He stepped into a limousine that was part of an enormous motorcade—so large it seemed designed more to convey an air of urgency than to shuttle around politicians.

  The convoy swung by a building on the Portuguese side of L
ajes where the prime ministers were waiting. Blair was invited to join Bush in his limousine, while José Maria Aznar of Spain and José Manuel Barroso of Portugal climbed into other cars. Then the motorcade sped off to the American portion of the base. There, the group was led to its meeting room.

  As the leader of the host country, Barroso welcomed his guests and launched into a long, cumbersome speech about the road that lay ahead.

  “We have to make a last effort for peace,” he implored. “We need to try one last time to reach a political solution.”

  There were formulaic nods and mutterings of agreement, amid an unspoken understanding that diplomacy had almost certainly failed. They had to present the U.N. with an ultimatum, Bush said—accept the resolution as written within twenty-four hours, or get out of the way.

  “This is our last effort,” he said. “Everyone has to be able to say that we did everything we could to avoid war. But this is the final moment, the moment of truth.”

  There would be no more hand-wringing, Bush said. Saddam still had the means—indeed, the incentive—to deliver weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaeda terrorists. The civilized world could not simply stand by, waiting for calamity to strike.

  “I am just not going to be the president on whose watch this happens,” Bush said. “I love my country and these people threaten it by their hatred for us.”

  But, he promised, he would pursue more than just a military action against Iraq—this was just a stage in his grander ambition to advance the Middle East peace process, and once Iraq was liberated from its tyrant, he would pursue that cause with vigor.

  Blair quickly struck a cautionary note. “The vote in Parliament is on Tuesday,” he said. “And if the vote fails, I’ll have to resign as prime minister.”