Hubris

by Michael Isikoff

  The Iraq connection to the anthrax attacks never went anywhere. And Bush did not immediately embrace the advice of Mylroie, Wolfowitz, Perle, and their allies. His first concern was Afghanistan, and on October 7, 2001, he launched military operations against the Taliban regime. But as the Bush administration prosecuted its military campaign in Afghanistan, the prospect of striking Saddam remained a top-drawer item of consideration. On November 21—nine days after the fall of Kabul had sent thousands of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters and supporters fleeing south—Bush took aside Rumsfeld, according to Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack, and asked him to draw up a fresh war plan for Iraq and to keep it a secret.

  THE hawks who had accepted Mylroie’s ideas about Saddam and terrorism were moving closer to their objective. In his first State of the Union speech, Bush decried the Axis of Evil, which in the speechwriting process had begun as a rhetorical attack only on Iraq. And over the next few months, there was a steady stream of preparation for war within the Bush administration but only the occasional leak indicating that a decision had been reached. On February 13, 2002, Knight Ridder reported that “President Bush has decided to oust Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein from power and ordered the CIA, the Pentagon and other agencies to devise a combination of military, diplomatic and covert steps to achieve that goal.” (The news service had caught a hint of Anabasis.) At a press conference in March, Bush declared that Saddam was “a dangerous man who possesses the world’s most dangerous weapons.” All the while, Wolfowitz was championing Mylroie’s thesis. At a March 17 lunch with England’s ambassador to the United States, Christopher Meyer, Wolfowitz tried to convince the British that Iraq was tied to the first World Trade Center attack. And in a June 1 speech delivered at West Point, Bush laid out a grand national security vision and said that he would take “preemptive action” to defend the nation and to “confront the worst threats before they emerge.” Strategies of containment or deterrence would no longer be considered sufficient. Iraq seemed to be the case he had in mind.

  ON JULY 23, 2002, Tony Blair held a meeting with senior members of his government to discuss Iraq. Richard Dearlove, the head of British intelligence, briefed the group on his recent talks in Washington, where he had met with CIA Director George Tenet. The minutes of the meeting recorded his report:

  Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

  The memo did not spell out what Dearlove meant when he said the intelligence was “being fixed.” But at this meeting Foreign Secretary Jack Straw raised questions about the WMD rationale for war. According to the minutes, Straw noted:

  It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.

  And at the meeting, Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon reported that the U.S. military had prepared several operations for the coming war.*9 The war, Hoon guessed, would start in January 2003.

  BY NOW, Laurie Mylroie had become a talking head on Iraq, hitting the cable news shows, writing op-eds, talking up her book, and urging war against Saddam. Appearing on CNN on July 31, 2002, she told anchor Aaron Brown that Bush had already decided to get rid of Saddam. She asserted that Bush had ordered the CIA to “do it by covert means” but that “no one, including the CIA director,” expected a secret attempt to overthrow Saddam to succeed. Thus, war was the only option. Fortunately, she noted, there already was a group ready and capable to lead Iraq to democracy following a military invasion: Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. Asked why Bush was committed to removing Saddam, Mylroie said it was “partly” due to Saddam’s weapons and “partly it’s [Saddam’s] prior support for terrorism, including strong suspicions about Iraq’s involvement in 9/11 in the part of the vice president’s office and the office of the secretary of defense.” But, Brown interjected, wasn’t it the general view within the U.S. intelligence community that Saddam had not been mixed up in 9/11? The CIA’s refusal to see the connection, Mylroie replied, was an “enormous scandal,” bigger than Enron. The CIA, she added, was engaged in an “enormous cover-up exercise” by not, in essence, accepting her theory that Saddam was behind 9/11. “No reasonable person,” she said, “…would conclude otherwise.”

  Honey, will you come into the office next week?

  —VALERIE WILSON, CIA OFFICER

  5

  The Niger Caper

  JOHN GIBSON, a young White House speechwriter, was at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York on September 11, 2002, putting the final touches on the president’s UN speech, when he received an urgent phone call on his cell phone. It was his boss, Michael Gerson, who had just been talking to White House communications aide Dan Bartlett. There was a new piece of intelligence that Gibson might be able to throw in the speech. They weren’t sure yet. If they didn’t use it in the speech, “it’s something we might leak to The New York Times,” Gerson said, according to Gibson. The speechwriter sensed that there was excitement at the White House about this latest nugget. What was it? he asked.

  Gerson told Gibson to go to a secure line that had been set up at the Waldorf for White House staff and call a National Security Council aide, Robert Joseph. Gibson, who handled many of Bush’s national security–related speeches, often worked with Joseph, and they were an odd couple. Gibson was a Democrat; he had been a national security speechwriter in the Clinton White House and stayed on to serve Bush. And he had doubts about a war in Iraq. “I’m not totally there yet,” he had told Gerson weeks earlier, when his boss had assigned him the UN speech. Great, Gerson had told him, “then you’re probably the perfect person to write the speech. If you can convince yourself, you can convince the country.” Joseph, the NSC special assistant for proliferation issues, was the last person who needed convincing. A tough hard-line conservative academic known for his skeptical views about arms control and international diplomacy, Joseph had a reputation for pushing evidence related to Iraq as far as it could possibly go. Joseph, one colleague later recalled, “was quick to see darkness where others might see dusk.”

  When Gibson reached Joseph that day, the NSC aide had what seemed to be important new evidence of Iraqi darkness. Saddam, Joseph said, had been attempting to obtain a massive amount of yellowcake uranium in Africa. Gibson immediately realized what that meant. It was the worst-case scenario: Saddam was looking to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb. For all his qualms about a war against Iraq, Gibson considered it his job to craft the most compelling case he could. And a charge like this would make the president’s speech much more convincing.

  As Gibson worked on the speech, Joseph and the NSC sent a message to the CIA, asking the agency to clear the use of three sentences:

  And we also know this: within the past few years, Iraq has resumed efforts to obtain large quantities of a type of uranium oxide known as yellowcake, which is an essential ingredient of this [uranium enrichment] process. The regime was caught trying to purchase 500 metric tons of this material. It takes about 10 tons to produce enough enriched uranium for a single nuclear weapon.

  Go ahead, the CIA replied, suggesting that the words “up to” be placed before “500 metric tons.” That day, Joseph and Gibson conferred several times about how to insert the yellowcake charge into the UN speech. Joseph even faxed to Gibson the language that had been cleared by the CIA. But, at the end of the day, the CIA wasn’t comfortable with Bush issuing this allegation in public. The information had come from a single foreign source. It had not been confirmed. It was not solid enough for a presidential speech. The CIA wanted it out. Strike it, Joseph said, and Gibson did.


  The president did not refer to Iraq’s alleged uranium shopping in his UN speech. The White House had been warned not to use it—and had heeded the warning. It was the first of several such warnings. But Bush’s eventual use of this allegation in the 2003 State of the Union address would epitomize his administration’s determination to deploy any evidence it could to justify the invasion of Iraq, even disputed information produced by bizarre circumstances. The yellowcake episode would blow up into a scandal that would bedevil the White House and lead to a criminal investigation of the president’s top aides. But nothing was stranger than how it began: with the intrigues of a shadowy, for-profit intelligence operator in Rome with a name straight out of a spy movie.

  ROCCO MARTINO was the sort of character who resides at the fringes of the intelligence world. A onetime Italian military police officer, Martino was a dapper, well-dressed, silver-haired, mustachioed fellow who described himself as an international security consultant. In reality, he was a snitch. He collected and peddled documents to businesses and to journalists—and to intelligence agencies, for which he occasionally was an informer. That included SISMI, the Italian military intelligence agency. As Martino himself would tell Carlo Bonini, a journalist for La Repubblica, “That’s my métier. I sell information.” And not just for the Italians. “I worked for the French…but I worked for SISMI as well,” he once told another Italian paper, Il Giornale. “I made a double, triple game.” And this professional informant had a checkered past. In 1985, according to court records unearthed by La Repubblica, Martino was arrested in Italy for extortion. In 1993, he was arrested in Germany for possessing stolen checks.

  Martino’s chief contact at SISMI was Colonel Antonio Nucera, an old friend and deputy chief of the spy agency’s counterproliferation division. As Martino would later recount to an Italian prosecutor, Nucera in 1999 put him in touch with a longtime SISMI source who worked as a clerk at the Niger Embassy, an elusive figure who would become known in the Italian press as “La Signora.”*10 Nucera suggested that La Signora, an Italian woman in her sixties, could be helpful to Martino. “Maybe she could bring out of the embassy some interesting material for you,” Nucera had said, according to Martino. Nucera’s motivation in setting up Martino with La Signora was—like much of this tale—puzzling. Nucera later said he had merely been trying to help a SISMI asset—La Signora—make some extra money. But it is also possible the Italian spymaster was steering his friend, Martino, toward politically useful material that some SISMI officials wanted publicly disseminated—without being directly involved. The strange twists of the Martino saga prompted such conjecture. Was it mere coincidence that the SISMI officer in charge of WMDs would lead Martino to documents—which would turn out to be fraudulent—detailing a uranium deal involving Iraq?

  Martino began meeting La Signora in early 2000 and plying her with gifts: a box of chocolate for her birthday, a fancy watch, some perfume. She later told Italian investigators that she first assumed that Martino was courting her. But news accounts noted that Martino had paid her a monthly fee. She in turn fed Martino documents from inside the Niger Embassy.

  After the pair had been working together for months, something odd happened. Early on New Year’s Day 2001, a break-in occurred at the offices of the Niger Embassy. Two days later, the embassy’s second secretary reported the theft to the police: a few file cabinets had been broken into. A watch and two bottles of perfume were missing. Also, some Niger government letterhead, stationery, and official stamps were gone. The police report was circulated to foreign governments. Spy agencies keep an eye on embassy break-ins. An analyst at the CIA subsequently recalled seeing a brief item on the break-in at the time and thinking, “Hmmm, wonder what that’s about?” The culprits were never apprehended.

  Italian police later suspected that the break-in had been staged to create a (false) explanation for how Martino would soon come into possession of documents bearing the stationery and stamps of the Niger Embassy. Which would mean that someone was trying to provide cover for Martino or La Signora. But who? And for what purpose? The robbery was yet another mystery in a murky saga that encouraged fanciful speculation.

  Niger, a landlocked, drought-ridden nation of 12 million in the sub-Sahara desert, is one of the poorest countries in the world. It has one principal economic product: a vast store of uranium deposits. Not surprisingly, most of the documents La Signora slipped to Martino concerned uranium deals, real and potential, including one in China. At one point, according to a statement La Signora later gave to an Italian magistrate, Martino told her that if she could produce documents showing Iraq had tried to obtain uranium from Niger, such papers could be sold for a lot of money.

  Whether Martino knew it or not, Western intelligence services had a specific reason to watch for a possible Niger-Iraq connection. In February 1999, Wissam al-Zahawie, the Iraqi ambassador to the Vatican, had visited Niger and three other African countries. The trip was officially an effort by the Iraqi diplomat to encourage African leaders to visit Baghdad and perhaps reestablish commercial relations—an obvious attempt to undermine the UN sanctions imposed on Iraq. Zahawie had an hour-long chat with Nigerien President Ibrahim Bare Mainassara. Years later, Zahawie claimed that all the two had talked about was the Iraqi’s “invitation” to Bare and the sanctions on Iraq: “During my visit to all four African countries, not once did I hear the word ‘uranium’ mentioned.” Bare “warmly welcomed the invitation and promised to visit Baghdad,” Zahawie recalled. But the Nigerien president was assassinated a few months later. Zahawie’s trip to Niger was duly noted by U.S. and European spy services.*11

  In the course of his dealings with La Signora, Martino obtained telexes, memos, and letters—some of which mentioned Zahawie—that purportedly showed that Iraq and Niger had signed a deal in July 2000 for Niger to sell Saddam’s regime 500 tons of yellowcake uranium. There was also another document in the batch that chronicled a seemingly bizarre meeting of officials from Iran, Iraq, and other nations who had gathered to discuss creating a “Global Support” military alliance of rogue states. This weird memo would subsequently become a key clue for one sharp-eyed U.S. official trying to unravel the mystery of the Niger deal.

  Years later, the FBI would conclude that La Signora, with the assistance of the Niger Embassy’s first counselor, Zakaria Yaou Maiga, had forged the papers and then passed them along to Martino to sell to his intelligence agency contacts. “It was a financial scam,” a senior FBI official familiar with the bureau’s investigation said in 2006. “This was concocted by La Signora, the guy at the embassy, and Martino.” But the bureau could not rule out any involvement by Nucera and SISMI, the Italian intelligence service, in the forgery scheme. The FBI’s investigation was limited, a senior bureau official said. Its agents were unable to question Nucera, Martino, or Maiga. (The FBI had no means to compel foreigners to testify in this sort of inquiry.) There were no “definitive conclusions” on whether there had been any SISMI participation, another senior FBI official said. Some FBI officials familiar with the case would still wonder whether elements of SISMI might have, for their own reasons, assisted in the caper.*12

  Whether SISMI had anything to do with the creation of the fraudulent documents, the Italian spy agency—directed by appointees of the conservative and pro-American prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi—ended up with copies of these papers in the weeks after 9/11. The Italian intelligence service then shared the information contained in these papers with its partners in American and British intelligence. As was customary among intelligence services, neither the CIA nor MI6 revealed to the other the source of the intelligence it had received on this troubling Iraq-Niger yellowcake deal. So neither service knew that each had gotten its intelligence on Iraq’s worrisome procurement of uranium in Africa from the same poisoned tree—a questionable, hustling, down-on-his-luck, shadowy operator who had hooked up with a conniving Italian clerk turned forger. From this point, their con job would take on a life of its own.

&
nbsp; THE first sketchy report on the Iraq-Niger uranium sale was cabled by SISMI to the CIA’s operations directorate on October 15, 2001. Initially, American intelligence analysts were not impressed by the report. CIA, Energy Department, and DIA analysts all considered the allegation “possible,” though short on details. The State Department’s INR thought such a deal was unlikely because a French consortium tightly controlled Niger’s uranium industry. Still, the CIA put out a Senior Executive Intelligence Brief stating that according to an unidentified foreign intelligence service, Niger as of early that year “planned to send several tons of uranium to Iraq” under a deal signed the year before. But there was “no corroboration,” the CIA cautioned. A month later, on November 20, 2001, the U.S. ambassador in Niger, Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, sent a cable to Washington from her embassy in Niamey. The head of the French-led consortium in Niger had assured her there was “no possibility” that Niger had diverted any of the approximately 3,000 tons of yellowcake produced annually in its two uranium mines.