The White House’s draft resolution was full of “whereas” clauses that cited Iraq’s persistent violations of UN Security Council resolutions and its previous use of unconventional weapons years ago. But several clauses went beyond the rhetoric of the previous weeks. They claimed that Iraq had demonstrated a “willingness to attack” the United States (with its futile efforts to shoot down U.S. fighter jets enforcing no-fly zones in Iraq) and that “members of al-Qaida…are known to be in Iraq.” On the WMD front, the resolution stated there was a “high risk that the current Iraqi regime will either employ [WMDs] to launch a surprise attack against the United States or its armed forces or provide them to international terrorists who would do so.” This was as serious an assertion as the Bush administration could toss at lawmakers and the American people. After the war, White House allies would insist that the president had never used the word “imminent” to describe the threat from Saddam. But the “high risk” of a “surprise attack” with weapons of mass destruction was just as stark and every bit as scary.
Bush and the White House were upping the rhetorical ante. And more charges were on the way.
Everything, everything, everything was connected to Saddam.
—DANIEL PIPES, MIDDLE EAST RESEARCHER
4
One Strange Theory
NOT LONG after the 9/11 attacks, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz dispatched former CIA Director James Woolsey on a secret trip to London.
Wolfowitz was not expecting Woolsey to come up with important new leads related to the events of September 11. Instead, Woolsey’s unorthodox mission was primarily to press the Brits for any evidence they might have that would validate the theories of an eccentric academic named Laurie Mylroie. A onetime Harvard assistant professor, Mylroie was convinced she had unraveled mysteries no one in the CIA or the FBI had been able (or willing) to divine, mysteries she believed added up to a stunning and historic conclusion: Saddam was the mastermind behind much of the world’s terrorism. In the aftermath of 9/11—with the U.S. government still trying to discern what precisely had happened and what should be done—Wolfowitz was focusing on far-fetched notions about Saddam promoted by this former college professor. But if Mylroie could be proven right—as both Wolfowitz and Woolsey ardently believed she was—her ideas could fundamentally shape the administration’s response to those attacks. Her research, if validated, could provide the casus belli to wage war on Iraq.
Wolfowitz and Woolsey were just two members of a small crop of current and former U.S. officials who in recent years had become enamored of Mylroie’s anti-Saddam work. The elaborate conspiracy theories she had propounded—dismissed as bizarre and implausible by the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities—would have enormous influence within the administration. It ultimately wouldn’t matter whether Wolfowitz and Woolsey could find information to confirm her ideas. They and others had already accepted them and would act accordingly.
THREE days after September 11, the conservative American Enterprise Institute held a press briefing. Former UN ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, past House Speaker Newt Gingrich, AEI scholar (and Chalabi champion) David Wurmser, and AEI fellow Michael Ledeen were corralled into a conference room in downtown Washington to offer instant analysis to members of the media, government officials, and fellow think-tankers. “The shock has been very great,” Kirkpatrick said. To explain it all, she first called on Mylroie, another AEI fellow and panelist. Mylroie got right to the point:
There has been no clear demonstration that Osama bin Laden was involved in Tuesday’s assault on the United States, but there’s been a lot of speculation to that effect, and it may turn out that he is. So assume that he is because I think the key question will be, how likely is it that Osama bin Laden’s group or any other group carried out these attacks alone, unassisted by a state? I’d like to suggest that it is extremely unlikely—in fact, next to impossible.
Who, then, was really behind the attacks? Mylroie had the answer: Iraq. There was no way, she insisted, that al-Qaeda could have pulled off 9/11 without the support of Saddam Hussein.
The rumpled-looking Mylroie had been anticipating a moment like 9/11 for years. Finally, she thought, she might soon see the result of a decade of hard work: a war against Saddam. Her own personal odyssey—which had taken her from promoting Saddam’s potential as a positive leader to decrying him as the leading source of evil in the world—was a key chapter in the war’s back story, a tale that also featured a band of like-minded policy wonks who had been pushing for a full-scale invasion of Iraq practically since the end of the first Persian Gulf War. Mylroie and her neoconservative allies would demonstrate, perhaps beyond their most fanciful dreams, that a few committed souls could change the world—even if they didn’t have their facts straight.
MYLROIE made her reputation as a Middle East expert and a prodigious researcher in the 1980s, when she was a graduate student and then an assistant professor of political science at Harvard University. She was at that time a pragmatist regarding Saddam, arguably sympathetic to the tyrant. The Iraqi dictator, she pointed out then, was not an Islamic fanatic; he was not passionately anti-American. Saddam, she thought, could be turned into a U.S. ally in the Mideast. In a 1987 piece in The New Republic—headlined “Back Iraq: It’s Time for a U.S. ‘Tilt’ ”—Mylroie and Daniel Pipes, a pro-Israel hawk who worked with her at Harvard, called for the Reagan administration to swing behind Saddam’s regime in its ongoing war with Iran. The two advocated sending weapons to Iraq and upgrading the intelligence Washington was already providing Saddam. The pair noted that Iraq had moderated its view of Israel and the United States (with which it had restored relations in 1984, thanks in part to the effort of Donald Rumsfeld, whom Reagan dispatched to Iraq as an envoy in 1983). A shift toward Iraq, Mylroie and Pipes wrote, “could lay the basis for a fruitful relationship” that would enhance both U.S. and Israeli security interests.
Beyond writing about the Middle East, Mylroie was looking to change the region through back-channel, private diplomacy—and she aspired to be a behind-the-scenes peacemaker who would broker a deal between Saddam and Israel. Amatzia Baram, an influential University of Haifa professor and an Israeli expert on Iraq, recalled that he had encouraged Mylroie in this endeavor. “Yeah, I was somewhat hopeful there could be a normalization of relations,” he said. The pair hatched a plan: Mylroie would visit Iraq and approach high-level officials there to see if they might be interested in exploring talks with Israel. Baram took Mylroie to see Ezer Weizman, the legendary Israeli Air Service hero then serving in the Cabinet of the Likud-led Israeli government. “Ezer liked the idea,” according to Baram, and gave this unofficial diplomacy a green light.
In 1987, according to Baram, Mylroie went to Baghdad and met with Tariq Aziz, the foreign minister, and Nizar Hamdoon, the Iraqi ambassador to the United States. She then visited Israel. Later, she organized an unofficial meeting at Harvard between Hamdoon and two Israeli Army generals. Hamdoon was coy and ultimately noncommittal. The Israeli Army generals, according to Baram, went back home with “mixed feelings,” concluding that Hamdoon was really just playing along as a way of placating the United States—not because Saddam’s regime had any real desire to make peace. Mylroie’s efforts at playing Henry Kissinger had gone nowhere.
But Mylroie continued to advocate engaging Saddam, even after the Iraqi dictator slaughtered tens of thousands of Kurds in what became known as the Anfal campaign of 1987 and 1988. That horrific attack caused the Reagan administration to formally condemn Iraq for its use of chemical weapons in September 1988. In May 1989, Mylroie wrote in The Jerusalem Post that Israel and the United States should not “poke” Iraq “with a stick” and should refrain from tossing “idle threats and harsh words” at Baghdad. She suggested Iraq might become a benign, if not positive, presence in the region. She pointed out that Saddam had even announced a program of democracy—including allowing freedom of speech and permitting opposition parties to operate—tha
t should not be dismissed out of hand. The following March, The Jerusalem Post quoted Mylroie as saying that Israel and Iraq ought to try to reach an informal understanding through a third party—perhaps an oblique reference to her own back-channel efforts.
Whatever hopes she harbored of being a Middle East peacemaker were dashed on August 2, 1990, when Iraqi troops poured across the border and occupied Kuwait. Saddam’s invasion crushed Mylroie—and turned her view of the world upside down. “Laurie was utterly horrified and aghast,” Pipes recalled. “She was in a state of shock.” Almost overnight, she turned against the dictator she had once wanted Washington to help, with the passion of one who felt personally betrayed.
After the invasion, Mylroie was asked by a New York publisher to collaborate with Judy Miller on a book on Saddam and the current crisis. Written in just twenty-one days, the paperback positioned Mylroie and Miller as two prominent experts on the evil and brutal ways of Iraq’s dictator. (“Saddam Hussein loves The Godfather,” they wrote.) An editor who worked on the book recalled that Mylroie often became obsessed with individual facts and exaggerated their importance: “She was capable of great insight and of investing the smallest detail with the most disproportionate weight. She was not always capable of making a straightforward, linear argument. Left to her own devices, she would seize on reeds she would think were redwoods.” Miller, though, found Mylroie a fine collaborator. “It was a great match,” Miller said later. “I learned an enormous amount about Iraq from her.”
Their book was no cry for military action. The conclusion took a cynical view of the first President Bush’s deployment of 100,000 U.S. troops to the region: “American forces had been sent to Saudi Arabia to protect the nation’s access to oil…. [T]he confrontation in the Gulf was prompted partly by greed—Saddam Hussein’s and America’s.” Saddam’s invasion, they wrote, was inexcusable, but Washington’s failed policies were also responsible for this crisis. Mylroie and Miller cautioned against imperial overreach. The book became a number one bestseller.
But as the book was about to come out, Mylroie’s past as secret freelance diplomat was exposed by an unlikely source: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. On October 4, 1990, Mubarak delivered a speech in which he claimed that Iraq and Israel had engaged in secret contacts in 1987 and 1989 through a Harvard University professor. Mubarak said this professor had carried a message from Saddam to Israel in 1987—that Iraq had no desire to go to war with Israel—and that in 1989 this professor had visited Israel to tell officials there that Saddam cared less about the Palestinian issue than his troubles with Iran and Syria. Mubarak was probably trying to embarrass Saddam. He did not name the professor, but Israeli newspapers did: Laurie Mylroie.
Mylroie refused to comment on Mubarak’s speech. More recently, she said that she had “never conveyed any messages” between Saddam and Israel. But in interviews for this book, five of her former associates in Israel and the United States confirmed that she had been a secret go-between between Baghdad and Jerusalem. In 1990 Judy Miller cryptically said to The Boston Globe that Mubarak had been “right on the substance” but that her coauthor had never served as an intermediary between Iraq and Israel. Yet in 2006, Miller acknowledged that “Laurie told me about the alleged ‘go-between’ role after a report surfaced in the press. She said it was never a formal arrangement, just an informal kind of thing.”
After the Saddam book was published, Mylroie was hired as a policy analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy by Martin Indyk, a Mideast expert influential in Democratic circles. And when Indyk became an adviser to presidential candidate Bill Clinton, he asked Mylroie on one occasion to join a group of foreign policy specialists briefing Clinton on Middle East issues. Her fifteen minutes or so with the Democratic candidate, according to Indyk, were unremarkable, but long enough that Mylroie soon began advertising herself as an “adviser” to the Clinton campaign on Mideast policy.
After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six people and injured more than 1,000, Mylroie’s work took a more dramatic turn. She began poring over the evidence and theorized that the bombing had been an act of retaliation by Saddam for the Persian Gulf War. The notion was not utterly out of the question. There were a few intriguing threads. One of the minor figures in the plot, Abdul Rahman Yasin, had fled to Iraq after the attacks. And Yasin’s precise status in Iraq was not clear. Born in Indiana of Iraqi parents, Yasin had grown up in Baghdad. After the bombing, Iraqi officials appeared to view Yasin as a potential bargaining chip, even offering at several points to hand him over to Washington in exchange for a shift in U.S. policy. Later on, evidence would emerge confirming what U.S. officials had suspected: that Yasin had been essentially placed under house arrest and was being watched closely by Iraqi security forces.*6 But in Mylroie’s view, Yasin had been granted safe haven by the Iraqis, and that could only mean that Yasin had been an Iraqi agent.
Mylroie also zeroed in on phone records involving the bombing suspects. One of the men, Mohammed Salameh, was the nephew of a Palestinian terrorist, Abu Bakr, who was living in Baghdad. Salameh, Mylroie discovered, had called his uncle forty-six times in June and July 1992—before his phone was cut off for nonpayment. Mylroie had no idea what was being said in these calls, whether they had anything to do with the World Trade Center plot seven months later or involved any connection to the Iraqi government. But it didn’t matter. “She would stare at you, and insist that unless you had studied all these phone records you couldn’t understand what was going on,” said Steven Emerson, a terrorism researcher who saw the World Trade Center bombing not as an Iraqi plot but as the act of Islamic extremists. “She would start rattling them off. At 4:07 A.M., this person called that person, then five minutes later they called someone else. How can you challenge something like that?”
Over time, Mylroie developed a Byzantine hypothesis about the 1993 bombing, one that seemed more the product of a Hollywood screenwriter than an Ivy League–trained scholar. She fixated on the mastermind of this first WTC attack, Ramzi Yousef. The FBI apprehended Yousef in Pakistan in 1995 and concluded that his name was but one of many aliases; that he was actually Abdul Basit Karim, a Pakistani national from the Baluch region who had been raised in Kuwait and who later studied engineering at the Swansea Institute in Wales. But Mylroie came to believe that there were, in a way, two Ramzi Yousefs. One was the real Basit, who under Mylroie’s theory had been killed or had otherwise vanished along with the rest of his family during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The other was Yousef, a cold-blooded Iraqi intelligence agent who had been trained by Saddam to kill Americans and who had absconded with Basit’s identity.
To back up her theory, Mylroie pointed to missing pages from Yousef’s passport and several small discrepancies. For example, witnesses recalled that the Basit they had known in Wales was a few inches shorter than the six-foot-tall man arrested by the FBI. She also maintained that the Iraqi intelligence services had forged the Iraqi passport that Yousef had used to enter the United States.
FBI investigators and federal prosecutors studied her ideas and rejected them. There were several fundamental problems that essentially stopped her conspiracy theory in its tracks. After Yousef was captured, bureau agents had located witnesses from the United Kingdom who testified at the terrorist’s bail hearing that the man in custody was indeed the same person they had known in Wales as Abdul Basit. And there was testimony from eyewitnesses identifying Yousef as an Islamic radical who had spent time in Afghan training camps affiliated with al-Qaeda. (Yousef himself admitted to federal agents that he had been trained in explosives and bomb making in Afghanistan.) More important, the bureau checked Yousef’s fingerprints with those for Basit in Kuwait and discovered they were one and the same. Thereafter, the FBI and federal prosecutors were pretty much convinced that Mylroie’s double-man idea was dead wrong.
“I don’t think there was any serious question of Yousef’s identity,” said Dieter Snell, a top investigator for the Septemb
er 11 commission who, as a federal prosecutor, tried the terrorist in the summer of 1996 in a separate case that involved a plot to blow up eleven airliners heading toward the United States. (A law enforcement official recalled that Mylroie showed up at that trial and eyed the defendant up and down intensely when he walked into the courtroom, as though she were trying to measure him.)
Still, Mylroie relentlessly promoted her double-man thesis to past and present government officials, foreign policy experts, and journalists. The FBI’s debunking of Mylroie’s narrative was not a matter of public record, and several neoconservatives accepted Mylroie’s work as compelling evidence of Saddam’s sponsorship of anti-American terrorism.
Indyk, now overseeing Iraq policy for Clinton’s National Security Council, had asked the FBI and CIA to review Mylroie’s theory. He wanted to believe it, Indyk later said. The Clinton administration had entered office inclined to adopt an aggressive approach toward Iraq—and this would have helped. But the CIA and FBI reported back that they had conducted an extensive analysis, Indyk said, and that “there was nothing to it.” As one CIA analyst later put it, “Not only was it not true, we proved the opposite”—that Saddam had had nothing to do with the 1993 WTC bombing.
Not long after that, Indyk received a visitor at his White House office. It was Paul Wolfowitz, who at the time was dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Wolfowitz had one item on his agenda: Laurie Mylroie’s theory about the World Trade Center. Wolfowitz asked why the Clinton administration was not paying adequate attention to her thesis. Indyk explained that, as far as he was concerned, it had been debunked by the CIA and FBI. Wolfowitz, according to Indyk, was “surprised” to hear this and not persuaded: “He was convinced that we were purposely refusing to see the link for policy reasons.” Indyk considered it odd that Wolfowitz appeared so attached to Mylroie’s ideas. He surmised that Wolfowitz felt personally guilty for the first Bush administration’s failure to get rid of Saddam after the Persian Gulf War. Mylroie’s theories could offer a justification for action that would rectify that past policy mistake. (Mylroie was also personally close to Wolfowitz’s then-wife, Clare.) Whatever the reason, Wolfowitz was putting more faith in Mylroie than the CIA or the FBI.*7
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