Over time, Mylroie became more persistent and more obsessive. She was so convinced that the 1993 World Trade Center bombing had been an Iraqi operation that she offered herself as defense witness for Eyad Ismoil, one of the alleged terrorists in the 1995 trial of the blind sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who was accused of conspiring to encourage acts of terrorism in the United States, including the WTC bombings. Mylroie’s position was that the defendants were patsies being held responsible for a monstrous crime committed by Saddam. Mylroie never took the stand. But she showed up at court hearings and at times appeared emotionally invested in the proceedings, according to Joan Ullman, a New York journalist who monitored the trial for Steven Emerson’s terrorist-tracking outfit. At one court hearing for Ismoil, who was accused of having driven the bomb-laden truck to the World Trade Center, Mylroie was spotted “cradling Ismoil’s father and at times, wiping tears from her own brimming heavily blue-eye-lined mascara,” Ullman wrote in a memo at the time.
After the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, Mylroie became convinced that that attack, too, was an Iraqi strike on America. She offered her services to the lawyers for Timothy McVeigh, the antigovernment zealot accused of setting off the bomb. Mylroie sent memos promoting the Iraq connection to the McVeigh defense team. Stephen Jones, McVeigh’s chief lawyer, hired her as a consultant and even sent investigators to the Philippines. It was Mylroie’s suspicion that McVeigh’s coconspirator, Terry Nichols, might have met in the Philippines with Yousef, the theoretical Iraqi agent. But the trail went cold. “I couldn’t make it go anywhere,” recalled Jones. As he saw it, Mylroie was a piece of work: an impressive tireless researcher who worked at a “fanatic” pace, calling him at all hours with new ideas and potential Iraqi links to the plot. “She was sort of like The Da Vinci Code people,” said Jones. “She had this one grand theory. I didn’t see it.”
In time, Mylroie saw the hidden hand of Saddam in almost every act of anti-American terrorism in the world, even the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa, Osama bin Laden’s first major assault against the United States. As for the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Yemen, an al-Qaeda operation that killed seventeen Navy sailors—that, too, was, for Mylroie, the handiwork of the Iraqi dictator. “Everything, everything, everything was connected to Saddam,” said her former collaborator Daniel Pipes. “She became monomaniacal on the subject.” She also became hostile toward old friends and colleagues who didn’t see the world her way. When Pipes publicly endorsed the predominant view that anti-U.S. terrorism was caused primarily by radical Islamic fundamentalists and questioned her Saddam-centric view of world terrorism, Mylroie accused Pipes of endangering the welfare of the republic. “My charge against you is that you are, at the periphery, responsible for the death of Americans,” she e-mailed Pipes on March 7, 1999. “And furthermore, that more Americans will die, if people continue to listen to your version of events.”
MYLROIE might have remained an oddball and offbeat academic insistently pushing a widely disregarded theory, but she had powerful friends, including Ahmad Chalabi and his compatriots within the Iraqi National Congress, who were certainly predisposed to depict Saddam as the world’s greatest menace. In the late 1990s, Mylroie joined Chalabi’s informal Washington kitchen cabinet. She advocated the INC’s cause at conferences and in academic journals and the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal and other publications. She was frequently seen at the home of Francis Brooke, Chalabi’s chief Washington lobbyist. Another new set of friends could be found at the offices of the American Enterprise Institute, where Mylroie landed a berth as an adjunct fellow. In the fall of 2000, the AEI published Mylroie’s book about the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, called Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America.
What was on the back of the book cover was as important as the text inside: a blurb from Paul Wolfowitz. It read:
Laurie Mylroie’s provocative and disturbing book argues powerfully that the shadowy mastermind of the 1993 bombing of New York’s World Trade Center, Ramzi Yousef, was in fact an agent of Iraqi intelligence. If so, what would that tell us about the extent of Saddam Hussein’s ambitions? How would it change our view of Iraq’s continuing efforts to retain weapons of mass destruction and to acquire new ones? How would it affect our judgments…and the need for a fundamentally new policy? These are questions that urgently need to be answered.
Wolfowitz, who had helped Mylroie with the manuscript, was carefully attaching his seal of approval to her thesis.
Perle, too, provided an endorsement of the work. (Woolsey wrote a supportive foreword for a later version.) In the acknowledgments, Mylroie saluted Wolfowitz and noted that his wife, Clare, had “fundamentally shaped this book.” She thanked John Hannah, who later would become a foreign policy aide to Vice President Cheney, for his guidance. She noted that the INC’s Francis Brooke and his wife, Sharon, had offered her much support and “keen insights.” She also expressed her gratitude to David Wurmser, Michael Ledeen, and John Bolton, a fierce hawk who would soon become the State Department’s top arms control official. Scooter Libby, she noted, had supplied her with “timely and generous assistance.”
When the Bush team took office soon after the book was published, Mylroie found herself with fans in high places. She was named to a Pentagon advisory board on terrorism and technology. And her most prominent champion, Wolfowitz, used his newfound power to seek confirmation of Mylroie’s thesis. Sometime before September 11, according to DIA director Thomas Wilson, Wolfowitz pressed the DIA chief on whether he had read Mylroie’s Study of Revenge. Wilson replied that he hadn’t. Wolfowitz requested that Wilson have his analysts examine the book. Wilson dutifully passed along the request, and an answer came back: the DIA couldn’t find anything to back up Mylroie.
In June 2001, Wolfowitz also tried to get the CIA to reinvestigate the Mylroie theory, according to the report of the 9/11 Commission. Nothing came of that, either. Wolfowitz had by then mastered the minutiae of Mylroie’s research—and retained it. “Wolfowitz was an encyclopedia on this stuff,” Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith subsequently said. And years later, according to Dobie McArthur, a Wolfowitz aide, the deputy defense secretary became excited when fresh intelligence surfaced about the whereabouts of an obscure associate of Yasin, the indicted 1993 bomber. Wolfowitz got up from his chair, pulled out a copy of Mylroie’s book, and opened it to the exact page where the associate was mentioned.
Within administration meetings in the early days of the Bush administration, Wolfowitz voiced a Mylroie-like view on terrorism. When the National Security Council of the new Bush administration held its first deputies meeting on terrorism in April 2001, Richard Clarke, then the White House counterterrorism adviser, talked about the urgent need to go after bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan, according to Clarke’s memoirs. Wolfowitz was dismissive. “Well, I just don’t understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden,” he replied. Wolfowitz tried to switch the subject to “Iraqi terrorism.” An exasperated Clarke replied that the intelligence community had no evidence of any recent Iraqi terrorism against the United States—a position endorsed at the meeting by CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin. Clarke started citing bin Laden’s writings and his plans to overthrow Arab governments and set up a radical multination caliphate, adding “sometimes, as with Hitler in Mein Kampf, you have to believe that these people will actually do what they say they will do.” Wolfowitz snapped back, saying that he resented any comparison between the Holocaust “and this little terrorist in Afghanistan.”
FOR years, neoconservatives, not just Mylroie, had been fixating on Iraq and the need to topple its tyrannical dictator. Their approach was more geo-strategic than Mylroie’s, but they ended up in the same place. In 1996, Perle, Wurmser, and Feith were part of a study group that produced a paper for the Jerusalem-based Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, a conservative, pro-Israel think tank closely allied with the policies
of Israel’s hawkish Likud Party. They noted that “removing Saddam Hussein from power” was “an important Israeli strategic objective” and that toppling his regime would be “a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambition.”
The paper, entitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” was policy advice for the new hard-line Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. It had numerous other elements, the most important of which was a decisive rejection of the idea that Israel should swap “land for peace” to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians. But as part of a larger plan to secure Israel’s security, the paper urged the removal of Saddam and the restoration of a Hashemite kingdom in Baghdad to box in the Syrian regime of Hafez Assad.
This report later led to another conspiracy theory: that eliminating Saddam was part of a neoconservative/Likud plot to benefit Israel. Yet the authors of “A Clean Break” had actually gone beyond the position of the Likud Party’s own strategists. By the late 1990s, Israeli officials tended to consider Iran a much more significant worry than Iraq. Indyk, who was U.S. ambassador to Israel in the mid-1990s and then again in 2000 and 2001, recalled that Iraq was barely mentioned as an Israeli priority during his years in Tel Aviv. “It was Iran, Iran, Iran all the time,” Indyk said. “The Israelis were not that bothered by Saddam.” Though “A Clean Break” was not evidence that the neoconservative fixation on Saddam was made (or coordinated) in Israel, it did show that Perle and his allies saw Saddam as a chessboard piece that should be removed to further a larger strategic game plan. This scrappy band of policy fighters seemed to believe that toppling inconvenient regimes could be achieved with relatively small costs—and that such bold steps could reshape the geopolitical map of the Middle East for the better.
In late 1997, The Weekly Standard, a magazine financed by media baron Rupert Murdoch and edited by William Kristol, former chief of staff for Vice President Dan Quayle, ran an issue with a cover proclaiming, “Saddam Must Go.” An editorial declared that the UN WMD inspections, under way since the end of the Persian Gulf War, had been ineffectual and that a containment policy would not work. In the same issue, Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad, then a strategist at the Rand Corporation, published an article that maintained that “only the substantial use of military force” with the goal of “the liberation of Iraq” would do the trick.
Kristol, Perle, and their allies were not plotting a conspiracy. They were advocating war in full public view. A month later, the Project for the New American Century, a foreign policy shop headed by Kristol, sent President Clinton a letter urging him to attack Iraq. If Saddam acquired WMDs, they wrote, “the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard.” The letter said nothing about bringing democracy to Iraq or the regime or what would happen after an invasion. The eighteen signatories on the letter included several conservatives who would wind up with positions in the George W. Bush administration, including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Bolton, Khalilzad, former Pentagon official Richard Armitage, and Iran-contra veteran Elliott Abrams.*8
After Congress passed and Clinton signed into law in the fall of 1998 the Iraq Liberation Act, the advocates of regime change were hardly satisfied—especially when it became clear that neither the Clinton administration nor Congress had any real plan for achieving the goal set out in the law. Nor were they mollified when Clinton, in December 1998, launched bombing strikes on military sites in Iraq, declaring that a Saddam regime in control of WMDs was a risk that could not be tolerated. (Explaining these air strikes, Clinton said, “Our mission is clear: to degrade Saddam’s capacity to develop and deliver weapons of mass destruction.”) Unless Clinton got fully behind the “Iraqi opposition” (meaning the Iraqi National Congress) and considered sending in U.S. troops, Robert Kagan of the Project for a New American Century wrote in The Weekly Standard, his policy would remain useless.
In September 2000, with a neck-and-neck presidential race under way, the PNAC produced a strategy paper that noted that the “United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” Taking out Saddam was about more than taking out Saddam. It was part of the larger strategic vision: expanding the United States’ influence and showing its muscle in the Middle East. When the George W. Bush administration took office in January 2001, it was clear to Bush’s Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill (as he would recount later), that one top-of-the-agenda item was getting rid of Saddam: “It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying, ‘Fine. Go find me a way to do this.’ ”
IN THE shell-shocked days following 9/11, much of the world was looking for an explanation. At the AEI event, Mylroie had one ready. She claimed that al-Qaeda did not have the “sophistication” and “organization” to pull off 9/11 and that the group was nothing but a Keystones Kops–like band of terrorists. “There’s evidence,” she asserted, “to suggest that Iraq was involved with bin Laden in the 1998 bombing [of two U.S. embassies in Africa] because those bombings occurred in a certain context.” For Mylroie, context was evidence. Mylroie concluded with the recommendation that all U.S. intelligence on terrorism be scrubbed and reexamined. Such a review, she maintained, would show that al-Qaeda was not a stand-alone outfit. Instead, Mylroie said, “a review will conclude that a good bit of the terrorism we have experienced since the Gulf War is merely another phase of the Gulf War—Saddam’s part of the Gulf War.” After she finished, Wurmser remarked, “I want to reemphasize everything Laurie just said…. We really do have to begin with Iraq.” Ledeen then called on the administration to “unleash” Chalabi’s INC. The debris from the World Trade Center had barely settled and cooled, and Mylroie and her allies were already pushing a war to overthrow Saddam.
THE Mylroie-bolstered belief that Saddam was America’s number one enemy also gripped the most senior officials of the Bush administration. Within hours of the al-Qaeda strike, Rumsfeld was asking if Saddam could be targeted as well as Osama bin Laden. The next day, Bush, according to Richard Clarke, pulled him aside in the White House Situation Room and asked him to look for evidence that Saddam had staged 9/11. When Clarke replied, “Mr. President, al-Qaeda did this,” Bush said, “I know, I know, but…see if Saddam was involved. Just look.” Another counterterrorism official who witnessed the exchange said that Bush was “very forceful” in his direction to Clarke. After Bush left the room, this official stared straight ahead with mouth wide open and had one thought: “This is Wolfowitz.” Days later, Clarke sent Rice a detailed memo that concluded there was no “compelling case” that Iraq had planned the 9/11 attacks. It also said there was no confirmed reporting that bin Laden and Saddam had cooperated on WMDs.
During the weeks following 9/11, Wolfowitz acted as if the terror attacks were proof of the theory he and Mylroie had advanced for years. After all, if Saddam had been behind the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, it made perfect sense he would have tried again in 2001. At a Camp David meeting of the Cabinet on September 15, Wolfowitz argued that there was a 10 to 50 percent chance Saddam had been part of the 9/11 plot, and he suggested Bush consider attacking Iraq right away, noting a war in Iraq might be easier than one in Afghanistan. On September 17, he sent Rumsfeld a memo, entitled “Preventing More Events,” that maintained that the odds were far better than one in ten that Saddam had been part of the 9/11 conspiracy; he cited the same thesis that Mylroie had developed that Iraq had been behind the 1993 WTC bombing. The next day, he fired off a similar memo to his boss. This one bore the ominous title “Were We Asleep?”—a suggestion that thousands of Americans were dead because the U.S. government had not perceived the real terrorist threat clearly. Then he dispatched Woolsey to London to find evidence th
at would back up Mylroie.
Officials at the Justice Department and CIA dismissed the trip as a wild-goose chase. “These guys don’t give up,” one senior Justice Department official said about Wolfowitz and his fellow Mylroie advocates. Justice reluctantly assigned a veteran prosecutor to accompany Woolsey on the mission. In London, Woolsey pushed British authorities to turn over more of Abdul Basit’s records, which he believed would show that the former student from Pakistan was not Ramzi Yousef. The Brits patiently explained that they had cooperated with the FBI for years on this matter and that the fingerprint evidence was conclusive: Basit’s fingerprints matched those of Yousef’s. Woolsey remained unsatisfied. “He was being a real pain in the ass,” recalled Tyler Drumheller, the CIA’s European Division chief, who at the time received complaints from the CIA’s London station about Woolsey’s trip.
Another big booster of the Saddam-as-master-terrorist theory was Bush’s new counterterrorism adviser, Wayne Downing, a retired general who once had designed an INC-backed plan for the overthrow of Saddam. In October 2001, Downing, Wolfowitz, and other proponents of a war with Iraq thought they had yet more ammunition for the case against Saddam. A series of deadly anthrax-laced letters had been sent to the Capitol Hill offices of Senator Daschle and Senator Patrick Leahy and to several newsrooms. Mylroie asserted that Saddam was behind the mailings. An early forensic test of the anthrax letters (which was later disputed) appeared to show that the anthrax spores were highly refined and “weaponized.” To the Iraq hawks, the news was electric. “This is definitely Saddam!” Downing shouted to several White House aides. One of these aides later recalled overhearing Downing excitedly sharing the news over the phone with Wolfowitz and Feith. “I had the feeling they were high-five-ing each other,” the White House official said.
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