Hubris

by Michael Isikoff

  Though the intelligence committee briefing had done as much to rile as to reassure, Cheney’s top secret presentation to the Gang of Four that day had paid off. When the congressional leaders departed that briefing, they looked grim. Hastert said the vice president had supplied important new information on Saddam’s weapons. Lott and Gephardt said much the same. Daschle was tentative: he hadn’t yet made up his mind; he still had questions needing answers. Nevertheless, he said, “It was a very helpful briefing.”

  On the cable news shows that night, Cheney’s session with the four legislators was depicted as progress for the White House. Daschle, it seemed, might be coming around. One commentator was driven to sarcasm. “Will miracles never cease?” exclaimed columnist Robert Novak, a cohost of CNN’s Crossfire. “Senator Tom Daschle, the Democratic majority leader, had a good word to say about Dick Cheney!”

  The administration’s warm-up was proceeding well. Next the White House would go public and selectively deploy intelligence—limited and flawed—to win popular support for the war to come.

  We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.

  —NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER CONDOLEEZZA RICE

  2

  The New Product

  DAYS AFTER Cheney won over three of the Gang of Four, the public became the Bush administration’s target audience. The official rollout was launched in a routine manner: on the Sunday morning chat shows. But it relied upon a rather unusual device: a feedback loop exploited by the White House. A leak of secret intelligence produced a dramatic front-page headline that senior administration officials then used to corroborate their most alarming claim. And Cheney, once more, was in the lead.

  But before that happened, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card spelled out—perhaps too candidly—what was under way. On September 7, a New York Times story quoted Card on the timing of the White House’s push on Iraq: “From a marketing point of view you don’t introduce new products in August.” Apparently, the White House had decided the first weekend after Labor Day—when the nation was about to mark the first anniversary of 9/11—was the optimal time to promote the “new product.”*2

  Appearing on Meet the Press the next day, Cheney asserted that Saddam “has indeed stepped up his capacity to produce and deliver biological weapons, that he has reconstituted his nuclear program to develop a nuclear weapon, that there are efforts under way inside Iraq to significantly expand his capability.” He maintained that there was “very clear evidence.” When the host, Tim Russert, asked about the evidence related to the nuclear weapons program, Cheney replied that Saddam “now is trying…to acquire the equipment he needs to be able to enrich uranium to make the bombs…. Specifically, aluminum tubes.” He then cited an authoritative source: “There’s a story in The New York Times this morning…”

  Cheney was referring to the paper’s lead story. The front-page headline declared, “U.S. SAYS HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS.” The article was powerful—and very convenient—ammunition for the White House:

  More than a decade after Saddam Hussein agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction, Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb, Bush administration officials said today. In the last 14 months, Iraq has sought to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials believe were intended as components of centrifuges to enrich uranium.

  The story was full of other alarming details: Iraqi defectors had told U.S. officials that acquiring nuclear weapons was a top priority for Saddam; U.S. intelligence agencies were tracking construction at nuclear sites. The piece also extensively reported the assertions of a pseudonymous Iraqi defector who alleged that Iraq had been developing, producing, and storing chemical weapons at both mobile and fixed sites across the nation. This defector appeared to know a lot: Iraq had produced five tons of VX, a lethal nerve agent; there were secret labs in Mosul and Basra; Russian scientists were currently helping Iraq develop chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons; Iraq was storing 12,500 gallons of anthrax.

  The article carried a shared byline: Michael Gordon and Judith Miller. Gordon was a respected and methodical defense correspondent for the paper. He had been responsible for the portion of the piece involving the aluminum tubes. Miller, a storied and intensely controversial Pulitzer Prize–winning correspondent, had handled the second half of the article, devoted to the defector’s frightening charges. The article conveyed an overwhelming impression: Iraq was a moveable feast of WMDs. And the story was loaded with quotes from unidentified senior Bush officials. One in particular stood out. Unnamed administration officials, according to the article, were worrying that “the first sign of a ‘smoking gun’ might be a mushroom cloud.”

  This hadn’t been a spontaneous remark; it was the public debut of a carefully constructed piece of rhetoric. The smoking gun/mushroom cloud sound bite had been conceived by chief speechwriter Michael Gerson and discussed at a WHIG meeting just three days earlier. For the White House, Gerson’s vivid metaphor, an administration official later said, perfectly captured the larger point about the need to deal with threats in the post–September 11 world. The original plan had been to place it in an upcoming presidential speech, but WHIG members fancied it so much that when the Times reporters contacted the White House to talk about their upcoming piece, one of them leaked Gerson’s phrase—and the administration would soon make maximum use of it.

  The Gordon-Miller scoop came at an opportune time for the Bush White House. A Saddam in possession of chemical and biological weapons—if he had them—was one kind of threat. A Saddam with a nuclear bomb was a much greater danger. It even looked as if the most important part of the story had been an orchestrated White House leak, for the lead sentence noted that Bush officials had told the Times about the aluminum tubes the previous day. But the article’s appearance had been partly fortuitous.

  Two weeks or so earlier, Howell Raines, the hard-driving executive editor of the Times, had ordered up an “all known thoughts” piece on what information U.S. intelligence agencies had on Iraq’s WMDs. “All known thoughts” was Raines’s phrase for Sunday megastories that would tell the Times’ readers everything there was to know on an important subject in the news. It had been clear that the administration was preparing an argument for war based on the supposed WMD threat. Cheney’s Nashville speech of mid-August suggested there was secret intelligence to back up the case. Raines wanted his readers to know what the White House knew.

  Gordon had long been interested in nuclear weapons proliferation and had a history of writing articles that contested the assertions of Washington’s hard-liners; Miller had contacts among Iraqi exiles and defectors and had written previously—though far too credulously—about allegations of biological and chemical weapons in Iraq. For this story, they each had worked their beats, asking sources repeatedly what was new about Iraq’s WMDs. During one interview, a government source mentioned to Gordon that he had heard something about aluminum tubes intercepted in Jordan that might be for a nuclear weapons program in Iraq. Gordon found that other officials were not eager to discuss the tubes—a classified matter. But within days, he located sources who confirmed the story—or what appeared to be the story. He was told that the U.S. government had the tubes in its possession. Obviously, then, government experts could have determined the purpose of the tubes. And the experts, Gordon was informed, had concluded that the aluminum tubes were for use in a gas centrifuge that would enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon. The story seemed solid.

  Miller’s reporting for this article was based primarily on the word of an anonymous defector who had come to her via a group of former Iraqi military officials. But Gordon had discovered the big news: the first piece of physical evidence that Saddam was trying to go nuclear. That would be the lead. Gordon then contacted the National Security Council for a response—which gave members of the White House Iraq Group a heads-up and time to consider how b
est to use a leak the White House had not orchestrated. “They didn’t want it out,” recalled a Times source. “Then they totally used it.”

  So there was Cheney on television citing the Times. He said that he could not reveal intelligence sources, but with the Times story, “it’s now public that, in fact, [Saddam] has been seeking to acquire” the tubes for his nuclear weapons enterprise. We know this, Cheney claimed, “with absolute certainty.” Millions of Meet the Press viewers could be forgiven for not realizing that Cheney was citing an article based on information that had come from his own administration. And Cheney went further by remarking that he could not say whether or not Saddam already had a nuclear weapon, leaving that an open possibility. It was a disingenuous remark, for no U.S. intelligence analyst at the time believed that Saddam had his hands on a nuclear bomb.

  But Gordon and Miller had missed an important detail: the significance of the tubes was based on a highly questionable judgment rendered by one single-minded CIA analyst. It was an assessment that this analyst had been pushing for a year and a half, but one sharply contested within the intelligence community by the government’s most knowledgeable experts. The tubes were no smoking gun. They were just tubes.

  A YEAR earlier, in the summer of 2001, David Albright, a soft-spoken physicist who ran a Washington think tank called the Institute for Science and International Security, received a phone call that rattled him. Albright, who had been a nuclear weapons inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency in Iraq, was an influential figure in debates about nuclear weapons and had a history of being tough and critical of Saddam’s regime. He, too, feared that Saddam might secretly be pursuing nuclear weapons—but he believed in the careful assessment of any evidence.

  His caller, a scientist at the IAEA in Vienna, said, “The people across the river are trying to start a war.” Across the river—that meant CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington. “They are really beating the drum, they want to attack,” Albright’s friend said.

  The phone call had been prompted by a visit to the IAEA by Joe Turner, a strong-willed CIA official who worked at the agency’s Center for Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control, a sprawling unit of seven hundred or so people in the Directorate of Intelligence. WINPAC, as the center was known, was charged with analyzing and tracking the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and Turner was among WINPAC’s rising stars. His manner was mild. He spoke with a slight twang. “He was not a snappy dresser and had a doughy face,” a colleague said. “He came across as an unassuming guy.” But he was a tenacious and aggressive analyst with a background in nuclear research. He had once worked at the Energy Department’s nuclear laboratory at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. During his visit to Vienna, he had startled the IAEA staff with his dogmatic presentation of an alarming conclusion: Saddam was attempting to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon.

  A few months earlier, Turner had seized on a single piece of intelligence: intercepted faxes indicating Iraq was seeking to purchase 60,000 aluminum tubes from Hong Kong. Why Iraq wanted the tubes was unclear. But Turner was struck by the fact that the tubes sought by Iraq were made from a high-strength alloy. Given their strength and size, he reasoned, Iraq could desire these tubes for only one reason: to use them as rotors that spin at extraordinarily high speeds in gas centrifuges that turn uranium into highly enriched uranium—the material needed for a nuclear bomb.

  Turner’s analysis quickly received high-level attention. This was the kind of hard-edged, out-of-the-box thinking that WINPAC wanted from its people. And it was the kind of analysis that policy makers in the Bush administration craved. Embracing Turner’s analysis, the CIA officially concluded that the tubes were meant for a nuclear weapons program. That spring, the first report on Turner’s assessment went straight to Bush in a superclassified President’s Daily Brief (PDB). On April 10, 2001, a follow-up report based on Turner’s analysis was included in another sensitive intelligence report circulated among top national security officials. The tubes, the brief said, “have little use other than for a uranium enrichment program.” This could mean only that Iraq had embarked on a renewed and ambitious campaign to acquire a bomb.

  The idea that Saddam wanted a bomb was plausible. He had sought to build one twenty years earlier and had been set back when the Israeli Air Force in 1981 bombed the country’s Osirak nuclear reactor. Then after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, weapons inspectors had found signs that Iraq had once again sought nuclear weapons and had been further along than the CIA or other intelligence agencies had assessed. But the postwar international inspections and UN sanctions had essentially shut down Saddam’s bomb program in the 1990s. The IAEA in 1998 reported that “there are no indications that there remains in Iraq any physical capability for the production of weapon-usable nuclear material of any practical significance.” And the U.S. intelligence community, through 2001, had concluded that Iraq did not appear to have reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. The tubes—or rather Turner’s analysis of the tubes—changed all that. “The tubes were everything for the administration’s case,” Albright later said. “They were something tangible that they could point to. Without it, they had nothing.”

  Yet Turner’s analysis was based on a questionable assumption: that the tubes sought by the Iraqi were suitable only for centrifuges and could not be used for anything else. As soon as the CIA’s reports started circulating within the U.S. intelligence community, Energy Department scientists—experts on nuclear weapons—began to challenge Turner’s finding. A team of scientists headed by Jon Kreykes, chief of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Advanced Technology Division, had been assembled to review the CIA’s evidence. Its first report, distributed on April 11, 2001, noted that the diameter of the tubes was half that of tubes used in a gas centrifuge tested by the Iraqis in 1990; that the tubes were only “marginally large enough for practical centrifuge applications”; and that the tubes had probably not been purchased for use in a centrifuge. A month later, the DOE reported that it had discovered another possible reason why the Iraqis had purchased the tubes: they were quite similar in size to aluminum tubes the Iraqis had previously used to build conventional rocket launchers.

  There were other reasons why the DOE scientists were suspicious of Turner’s conclusion: the Iraqis had been buying the tubes fairly openly, sending out multiple purchase orders and faxing them to international suppliers, and then haggling over the prices. The Iraqis had even advertised for the tubes on the Internet. None of that seemed consistent with a secret nuclear weapons program.

  Then the CIA got hold of the actual tubes.

  The agency had a whole platoon of operations officers and analysts tasked with tracking and penetrating Iraqi procurement efforts around the world. The electronic eavesdroppers of the U.S. intelligence committee were constantly on the watch for information—an e-mail, a conversation, a fax—pertaining to any equipment heading to Iraq that might be related to unconventional weapons. The CIA got advance notice of shipments of tubes from Asia heading for Iraq through Jordan. At the request of the CIA, Jordanian intelligence seized the shipment. In the summer of 2001, one CIA officer assigned to liaison work with the Jordanians regarding the tubes was Valerie Wilson. She traveled to Jordan. She saw the tubes, which were sitting at a storage yard, piled up and exposed to the elements. Samples had been sent to Langley.

  Even with the tubes in hand, the battle lines did not change. DOE analysts found that the actual tubes indeed matched those Iraq had previously used for artillery rockets. And Turner was forced to concede that the samples did not fit the dimensions of most gas centrifuge designs. But he insisted they were a match for a centrifuge developed by a German scientist, Gernot Zippe, in the 1950s. Houston Wood, a University of Virginia nuclear scientist who served as a consultant to the Energy Department team, checked with the aging Zippe. Not so, Zippe told him, not even close. (As the Senate intelligence committee later found, although the inner diame
ter of the tubes was “close” to the dimensions of the Zippe design, the wall thickness of the Iraqi aluminum tubes was more than three times that of the Zippe design. The tubes themselves were twice as long.) “Rocket production,” not nuclear weapons, “is the more likely end-use for these tubes,” read a classified August 17, 2001, Energy Department intelligence report.

  Nor was the Department alone in its doubts. In late 2001, the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) conducted an internal study of the Iraqi nuclear issue and the tubes. The INR canvassed the nuclear labs and interviewed several nuclear scientists. “We were talking to all these experts, and they were telling us, ‘No, no, no, this is not the kind of [tubes] you use for centrifuges,’ ” Greg Thielmann, the director of proliferation for the INR, later said. In a lengthy memo to Powell late in 2001, and in a follow-up report in early 2002, the INR strongly disputed the CIA’s tubes argument, as well as the rest of the case for a resurgent Iraqi nuclear program. “The consistent message from INR,” Thielmann later noted, “was that there is no good evidence” at all that Iraq had restarted its nuclear program.

  Turner refused to back down. In meetings and videoconferences with Energy Department scientists (and later with IAEA officials, who were also skeptical of his conclusions), he arrogantly dismissed the dissents and showed no willingness to engage in debate. “He was very condescending,” recalled Robert Kelley, a weapons inspector with the IAEA, who sat in on meetings with Turner. “It was like he was on a kind of messianic mission. If you questioned him, he would just say, ‘If you knew what I know.’ Which is what intelligence people always say. It was like he didn’t want to hear the right answer.”