Al-Haideri claimed to be a civil engineer who had visited twenty secret facilities for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons in Iraq. His account suggested that Saddam had an extensive WMD infrastructure. One of the secret sites, al-Haideri asserted, was located underneath Baghdad’s main hospital. The white paper noted that al-Haideri had “supported his claims with stacks of Iraqi government contracts, complete with technical specifications.” At the end of the White House paper’s al-Haideri passage was a footnote that indicated all the information on this defector had come from a December 20, 2001, New York Times article written by Judy Miller.
The white paper did not disclose that the sensational al-Haideri allegation and the Salman Pak terrorist training camp charge had both been orchestrated by an especially problematic source: the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi.
AHMAD CHALABI—savior of Iraq or international scam artist? The U.S. government was bitterly divided. The reliability of Chalabi and his INC had been a contentious issue inside the U.S. intelligence community for years.
The scion of a wealthy Shiite banking family and a self-styled exile leader, Chalabi, as far as the CIA could tell, had no actual support inside Iraq. He hadn’t lived there for decades, having emigrated with his family in the late 1950s, when he was thirteen years old. He was suave and charming. He boasted a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago. But Chalabi also had a checkered background. He was a convicted embezzler, judged guilty in absentia in Jordan in 1992 for defrauding nearly $300 million from the Petra Bank, an institution he had owned and operated there. (Chalabi claimed he had been set up by Saddam.) Even some of his associates and allies acknowledged he had a manipulative air about him. “Ahmad would always say,” recalled one of his former Washington deputies, “ ‘It’s dangerous if you believe your own propaganda.’ ” Martin Indyk, who dealt with Chalabi when he served as an assistant secretary of state for the Middle East during the Clinton administration, said, “Of course, he was a con man. That was his charm.” After spending a long evening with Chalabi, Wayne White, an Iraq expert at the State Department, concluded, as he later said, that Chalabi, “despite all his so-called winning charm,” was no more than “a clever used-car salesman.” This opinion was, more or less, the consensus view at Foggy Bottom.
Washington’s decade-long relationship with Chalabi had been tumultuous. After the first Persian Gulf War, Chalabi had promoted himself as the next leader of Iraq, and the CIA, desperate for anti-Saddam assets, had bought the idea. The agency set up Chalabi in the Kurdish region of Iraq, an area not controlled by Saddam, as part of a quixotic plan to trigger an insurrection inside the country. The CIA supplied tens of millions of dollars in funds and equipment to Chalabi so he and his INC could foment dissent inside Saddam’s regime. But the coup plotting turned into a disaster. Chalabi, working with Kurdish rebels and a few CIA officers on the ground, launched a revolt in 1995. But a hoped-for uprising of Saddam’s army officers never materialized. “Chalabi didn’t deliver a single lieutenant, let alone a colonel or a general,” Robert Baer, the CIA officer who worked most closely with Chalabi, later said.
Shortly afterward, John Maguire, the CIA specialist in paramilitary operations, was dispatched to the Kurdish region to figure out what had gone wrong—and what Chalabi was doing with the agency’s money. Chalabi, he discovered, was living out of a large house with a fleet of luxury cars in the driveway. (Chalabi at the time was also living well in London.) When Maguire went to the INC’s CIA-funded newspaper office, he found two men working there but no newspaper. The same was true for the INC radio station. There was an office and a tower—but nothing was being broadcast. The entire Chalabi effort, Maguire concluded, was a sham. In January 1996, an indignant Maguire confronted Chalabi in a meeting in London and demanded an accounting of the agency’s funds. “You’ve been lying to us,” he told him. “You’ve been screwing us.” Chalabi, caught off guard, accused the veteran CIA officer of being impossible to deal with and “thinking like an Arab.” According to another CIA official, Maguire got so furious, he told Chalabi if he ever saw him walking down the street in London, he would swerve his car onto the sidewalk and mow him down. Years later, Maguire didn’t deny the remark. “I was pissed off,” he said. “It was an ugly meeting.”
There was another problem that worried the CIA: Chalabi and the INC’s connections to Iran. It was no secret that Chalabi, a Shia, frequently traveled to Iran (where he had a home) and maintained contact there. The INC even had a liaison office in the Iranian capital. The INC and Tehran shared a common aim of getting rid of Saddam. But there was more to the CIA’s concern. The agency discovered, according to Maguire, that a senior Chalabi aide, Aras Habib, had been meeting in northern Iraq with officers of MOIS, the Iranian intelligence service. An analysis of intercepts bolstered the agency’s suspicions. Habib, Maguire said, was receiving “tasking” instructions from MOIS officers—and passing back information to the Iranians about the identity of CIA officers and U.S. plans in the region. Bob Baer, who preceded Maguire as chief agency officer in the region, said that Habib was even using CIA safe houses in northern Iraq for his meetings with the Iranians. Zaab Sethna, who served for years as Chalabi’s spokesman, would later insist that Habib had been fully open about his dealings with the Iranians—and that his contacts were no different than those of other Iraqi opposition groups. But by the mid-1990s, according to both Maguire and Baer, the CIA had concluded that Habib might well be an agent of Iranian intelligence.
In late 1996, the agency finally cut off Chalabi, and the Clinton White House distanced itself from him. But Chalabi found others to court in Washington. He aggressively worked Capitol Hill and developed relationships with conservative Republicans, such as House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who saw in Chalabi’s cause an opportunity to bash Clinton for a feckless foreign policy. He forged alliances with an array of neoconservative intellectuals and policy wonks, including Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, who as a hawkish assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan years earned the nickname “Prince of Darkness.” The American Enterprise Institute, a think tank that was home to scholars favoring a confrontation with Iraq, was full of Chalabi advocates. (Cheney had been a senior fellow at AEI in the 1990s.)
In 1998, Congress passed, and Clinton signed, the Iraq Liberation Act, a law pushed by Chalabi, which formally committed the U.S. government to regime change. No one in the administration quite knew how that was supposed to be achieved, but Congress appropriated $97 million for the effort. The State Department subsequently handed out tens of millions of dollars to Iraqi opposition groups, with the INC receiving about $33 million from March 2000 to May 2003. Much of this money funded INC’s “information collection program,” essentially a U.S. government-sponsored propaganda operation under which Chalabi and his deputies were paid to troll Arab communities around the world in search of Iraqi defectors and exiles who could provide the U.S. intelligence community and the news media with information about Saddam’s misdeeds.
With the election of George W. Bush, Chalabi’s years of cultivating conservatives in Washington paid off. His most prominent champions were now in key positions throughout the government. Wolfowitz became deputy defense secretary; Perle, the new chairman of the Defense Policy Board. And Cheney’s office was stocked with Chalabi fans, including Libby, John Hannah, and retired Navy Commander William Luti, a former foreign policy aide for Gingrich. Luti then moved to the office of defense undersecretary Douglas Feith to oversee a newly created unit to prepare for war, the Office of Special Plans. David Wurmser, an AEI scholar who had once called Chalabi a “mentor,” would also go to work for Feith. These and other friends in the new administration looked to Chalabi to lead the way in any final confrontation with Iraq. Chalabi’s past exploits and failures didn’t matter. He had seduced the neoconservatives, and his previous trouble with the CIA was even a selling point among these national security intellectuals, who had long suspected the agency of being timid and too conv
entional.
Chalabi’s friends, though, did try to turn around the skeptics at the CIA. A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard, the CIA’s number three official, recalled being lobbied repeatedly by Perle and Wolfowitz before the September 11 attacks to drop the agency’s opposition to the INC chief. Perle arranged a dinner at a downtown Washington restaurant, attended by Wolfowitz, so that Krongard could talk to Chalabi directly. Chalabi, Krongard recalled, was “as charming as he could be” and tried to convince Krongard that he was not the “scoundrel” that agency officials thought he was. (After the dinner, according to Krongard, Chalabi insisted—over the CIA man’s objections—on picking up the hefty tab, a generous gesture that misfired when the waiter politely informed Chalabi that his credit card had been rejected.) Krongard and the CIA refused to reconsider. Not long afterward, Wolfowitz came to lunch at the CIA and pushed Krongard harder about Chalabi. In refusing to work with Chalabi, “you’re undermining the president,” Wolfowitz said gravely.
The battles over the INC and Chalabi grew more intense after September 11. The INC introduced a new wave of defectors to U.S. intelligence agencies. Most, the CIA concluded, were charlatans, asylum seekers, and hustlers simply saying what Chalabi and the INC wanted (or told) them to say in exchange for the group’s assistance in getting them to Europe or America. Meanwhile, the INC’s record keeping—which was supposed to track how U.S. funds were being used—was a shambles. In mid-2002, an internal CIA study, commissioned by the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, found that the information gathered under the “information collection” program was largely useless. Richard Armitage, the salty deputy secretary of state, was especially outraged. “We were doing everything we could to get rid of the program,” one State Department official recalled. About that time, according to this official, Armitage convened a meeting to discuss the INC program. “The best thing that can happen is this thing gets shit-canned,” Armitage proclaimed. “So shit-can it!” If that couldn’t be done, Armitage had a fallback position: “Get this off our books and give it to somebody else.” (The INC program was later transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency.)
By this point, Chalabi didn’t need the State Department or even the CIA. The INC was funneling its information to Chalabi’s advocates in the Pentagon and Cheney’s office. And the INC was also making its defectors available to friendly members of the press—and producing a stream of dramatic (but false) stories about Saddam’s weapons and terrorism connections. A June 2002 list prepared by the INC boasted of 108 English-language media stories within the previous eight months that had included “product” from its “intelligence collection program.” The Sunday Times of London, Vanity Fair, Time, The Atlantic Monthly, NPR, CNN, The New Yorker, Newsweek, Fox News, 60 Minutes, The National Review, The Weekly Standard, the Associated Press, The Washington Times, The Washington Post—each had published or broadcast information from Chalabi’s outfit, according to the INC.*3
The INC official in charge of this program, which was designed to shape public opinion in the United States, was Aras Habib, the same Chalabi aide suspected by the CIA of being an Iranian agent. CIA officials aware of this, such as Maguire, wondered whether Iranian intelligence was working through the INC to influence American policy. But they sounded no alarms. “There was no fighting City Hall on Chalabi,” Maguire recalled.
Despite the agency’s suspicions, the INC continued its propaganda effort, and one major recipient of its intelligence was The New York Times. Two INC-assisted Times stories—each based on false (or worse, fabricated) information from an INC-promoted defector—became the basis of the most alarming portions of the white paper drafted by White House aide Jim Wilkinson to support Bush’s speech at the United Nations.
WILKINSON’S section on Saddam’s “support for international terrorism” cited Salman Pak, a supposed training camp for terrorists—possibly anti-American terrorists. The white paper attributed this information only to unnamed “former Iraqi military officers.” But the sources were INC-supplied defectors, primarily a former Iraqi captain named Sabah Khalifa Khodada al-Lami, who had emigrated to the United States in May 2001 and who claimed to have worked at this camp. After September 11, the INC brought Khodada to the attention of the United States with the help of an influential friend: R. James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA. Woolsey, an attorney, was representing, pro bono, INC exiles in deportation proceedings. His law firm, Shea & Gardner, lobbied for the Iraqi National Congress.
Shortly after 9/11, INC officials took Khodada to Woolsey’s law office so the Iraqi could tell the former CIA director about the disturbing training that went on at the Salman Pak site. Woolsey then called friends in the Pentagon to arrange for Khodada to become a U.S. intelligence source. As for verifying the accuracy of Khodada’s claims, the ex-CIA chief—who would later make a similar referral for another INC defector—subsequently remarked, “that’s not my problem.”
While Woolsey and the INC were injecting Khodada’s serious charges into the U.S. intelligence stream, INC lobbyists Francis Brooke and Zaab Sethna were escorting Khodada to the offices of various news organizations. As Brooke acknowledged much later to Vanity Fair, the INC’s overall plan at the time was straightforward: provide the Bush administration cause for invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam. “I told [the INC], as their campaign manager,” Brooke said, “ ‘Go get me a terrorist and some WMD, because that’s what the Bush administration is interested in.’ ” And if this resulted in Chalabi becoming Iraq’s next leader, no one in the INC would mind, least of all Chalabi.
Soon Khodada was cited in a series of press stories, starting with an op-ed column by Washington Post foreign affairs writer Jim Hoagland, who reported Khodada’s claim that Salman Pak trained terrorists in airline hijacking and assassinations. Next, on October 27, 2001, a front-page story in The New York Times by Patrick Tyler and John Tagliabue noted that Khodada contended that non-Iraqi Arabs had been given training in terrorism at this camp. And PBS’s Frontline reported that in an interview Khodada had said that “all this training” at Salman Pak was “directed towards attacking American targets” and that the 9/11 operation was “conducted by people who were trained by Saddam”—presumably at this camp.
But there was little, if any, corroboration for Khodada’s tales, and U.S. intelligence agencies had discounted them from the start. There was indeed an Iraqi military facility at Salman Pak with a derelict Boeing 707 aircraft on site for training. The United States had satellite photos of the site. U.S. officials believed that years earlier Salman Pak had been used to train Palestinian terrorist groups. But U.S. intelligence agencies had a less disturbing explanation for what was currently happening there: Iraqi security forces were using the aircraft to train to respond to a terrorist hijacking, not to conduct one—the precise opposite of what Khodada was asserting. The INC, according to Zaab Sethna, soon cut off all contacts with Khodada after he started demanding money for his information. But by then, it didn’t matter. Khodada had already been a key source for multiple news stories. And the White House was now using those problematic news accounts to spread his tales to the world.*4
THE white paper’s most serious WMD charge—Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri’s account that he had personally visited clandestine facilities for the production of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons in Iraq—was also the result of a successful INC operation that involved the nation’s most prestigious newspaper.
After spiriting al-Haideri out of Damascus, where he had fled following his defection from Iraq in mid-2001, the INC flew him to Thailand and notified the Pentagon it had a potentially big catch. The DIA was more than interested. “This guy is the mother lode,” the INC’s Zaab Sethna recalled being told by an intelligence officer at the time, “and if even 5 percent of what he says turns out to be right, then we have hit the jackpot.” But al-Haideri still had to be vetted. The DIA arranged for a CIA polygraph examiner to fly to Pattaya, Thailand, to administer a lie detector test t
o the forty-three-year-old Kurd. For days before the CIA polygraph expert arrived, Zaab Sethna prepped al-Haideri for the exam. But Sethna’s coaching didn’t work. The CIA official found the defector’s responses about his background replete with deception. He concluded that al-Haideri had concocted his story.
Chalabi and Sethna weren’t through, though. They contacted two journalists whom they hoped would carry al-Haideri’s tales to the world. One was Paul Moran, an Australian freelancer (who previously had worked for the INC and the Rendon Group, a secretive Washington, D.C., consulting firm that years earlier had been contracted by the CIA to work with the INC). The other was Judy Miller. With Miller, the INC had the right vehicle to ensure that al-Haideri’s story would receive wide circulation. And this was precisely the sort of story the Times and Miller wanted.
In the weeks after 9/11, Times executive editor Howell Raines had been, as one editor at the paper at the time later put it, “maniacal.” He wanted his paper to be first and best in covering the horror that had occurred and anything related to it. But when The Washington Post kept scooping the Times on 9/11 stories—especially when the Post’s Bob Woodward disclosed the contents of a handwritten note that 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta had left behind in a piece of luggage—Raines went ballistic. At one point, he hauled Stephen Engelberg, the investigative editor, into a meeting and declared, “I don’t want the first line on my obituary to be ‘He was the editor of The New York Times when they blew the 9/11 story.’ ” Engelberg subsequently recalled that he left the meeting and told a deputy, “Have I lost my mind or what? Is this literally that personal, that Howell views this as, ‘You’re fucking up my place in history’?” Another Times reporter years later said that in the weeks after 9/11 there was a “lethal combination of ambition, anger and mania. A line that runs from Howell to Judy Miller.”
Hubris Page 7