Hubris

by Michael Isikoff

  BUT the White House kept pushing. Barely two weeks after the CIA had blocked the Niger claim from being inserted into Bush’s UN speech, White House aides looking to fortify the Iraq nuclear case got a boost from the United Kingdom. On September 24, 2002, Tony Blair’s government, in a major media event, released its own white paper on Iraq and WMDs. The document claimed that Blair’s government possessed “significant” information on Iraq’s WMDs obtained from “secret intelligence sources.” This “secret intelligence” supposedly showed that Saddam was making progress in his WMD programs and that he was “ready to use” WMDs. Specifically, the paper said that Saddam was producing chemical and biological weapons; that he was developing mobile biological weapons labs; and that he possessed biological and chemical weapons that were “deployable within 45 minutes.” The intelligence on the forty-five-minute claim was so iffy that the CIA had rejected it; Tenet privately referred to it as “shit.” But it had the desired effect. “BRITs 45 Mins from Doom,” screamed the headline in one London tabloid, which ran an article suggesting that British bases in Cyprus could be blown away by Saddam’s WMDs at any time.

  The white paper tracked with the White House’s key allegations: Saddam had covertly sought equipment for a nuclear weapons program (a reference to the aluminum tubes);*14 he was developing long-range missiles that could carry WMDs; he had tried to turn a jet trainer into an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that could carry chemical and biological weapons a long distance. But the British also declared that Saddam had “sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

  The White House, which had just been warned off the same claim by the CIA, now jumped on this new uranium-shopping-in-Africa charge. At his daily White House press briefing, press secretary Ari Fleischer was asked if the British paper contained anything new and noteworthy. He pointed to two conclusions: that Saddam had unconventional weapons that could be launched within forty-five minutes and that he had been seeking to procure uranium in Africa. “That was new information,” Fleischer said, adding, “We agree with their findings.”

  Following the release of the British white paper, Bush ratcheted up the rhetoric. “Each passing day could be the one on which the Iraqi regime gives anthrax or VX—nerve gas—or someday a nuclear weapon to a terrorist ally,” he declared at a White House ceremony on September 26. Two days later, in his weekly radio address, Bush said that Saddam “could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as forty-five minutes” (despite the CIA’s rejection of this dramatic charge). He reported that he had spoken with both Democratic and Republican members of Congress and that “we are united in our determination to confront this urgent threat to America.” He said that an agreement was near regarding the congressional resolution he was seeking from Congress. Indeed, the day the British white paper came out, Daschle had said, “Republicans and Democrats are prepared to give the benefit of the doubt under these circumstances to the administration.”

  The Niger charge was now fully in play—and would soon take on a significance that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Joe Wilson, and Rocco Martino could never have imagined.

  Are you sure Elvis wasn’t there also?

  —9/11 COMMISSION INVESTIGATOR

  6

  The Secret Diggers

  ON SEPTEMBER 16, 2002, a pair of dogged Pentagon researchers arrived at the White House to deliver an unusual briefing. The audience was high level: Scooter Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, and Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser. The researchers were from a small unit, dubbed the “Iraqi intelligence cell,” that had been created by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, Rumsfeld’s loyal policy chief. They had spent months combing through raw intelligence reports and uncovering patterns that they believed had eluded the rest of the U.S. intelligence community. And they had turned all these data into a classified slide show designed to make one large point: Saddam Hussein’s regime had a far more extensive relationship with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda than the CIA had acknowledged. There had been, one of their slides asserted, nearly two dozen “high level contacts” between Iraqi officials and al-Qaeda operatives dating back more than a decade. Another slide claimed that there had been “multiple areas of cooperation.” And the Feith team reported that Saddam’s intelligence service had played a “facilitation” role in the September 11 attacks. An Iraqi intelligence agent, the briefing said, had ordered that funds be disbursed to one of the hijackers. If that was not a reason for war, what would be?

  The most important part of their case was a supposed meeting between Mohamed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker, and an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague in April 2001. This allegation was not new. It had been examined and dissected for nearly a year, both within the U.S. intelligence community and by the media. William Safire, the conservative New York Times columnist, had written about it frequently, calling the Prague meeting an “undisputed fact.” Laurie Mylroie and James Woolsey had also cited it. Dick Cheney—when asked whether Saddam was connected to 9/11—had referred to the meeting repeatedly. “It’s been pretty well confirmed that [Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service,” he insisted during a December 9, 2001, appearance on Meet the Press. And eight days before the Feith team’s briefing for Libby and Hadley, Cheney had raised it again on Meet the Press, the same show on which he had touted the aluminum tubes.

  “We have reporting that places him [Atta] in Prague with a senior Iraq intelligence official a few months before the attack on the World Trade Center,” Cheney told Tim Russert.

  “What does the CIA say about that?” Russert asked. “Is it credible?”

  “It’s credible,” the vice president replied. “But you know, I think a way to put it would be it’s unconfirmed at this point.”

  But Cheney had been disingenuous. The CIA and the FBI had already concluded that the meeting had probably never taken place. Yet that hadn’t stopped Feith’s briefers from presenting the Atta charge to Libby and Hadley as if it had been fully confirmed. One of their slides declared—as fact—that Atta had visited the Iraqi intelligence service office in Prague “at least twice” (in June 2000 and again in 2001, on April 8 and 9) and met with Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, the Iraqi intelligence chief of station. Atta, according to the slide, had also “reportedly met” with the Iraqi chargé d’affaires in Prague, and al-Ani had ordered the Iraqi intelligence “finance officer” in Prague to issue funds to Atta. Finally, the slide stated, several workers at the Prague airport had identified Atta after September 11 and “remember him traveling with his brother Farhan Atta.”

  The Feith team could not say what Atta and Ani had discussed—had they met. There were no eyewitness accounts or tape recordings. There was no telling if the supposed meeting had been about 9/11. Still, the idea that Atta might have secretly rendezvoused with Iraqi intelligence was explosive—and much easier to comprehend than Laurie Mylroie’s convoluted hypothesis about there being two Ramzi Yousefs.

  Feith’s slide show, especially the Atta portion, was a hit at the White House. The following day, a Feith aide reported to Wolfowitz that “the briefing went very well and generated further interest from Mr. Hadley and Mr. Libby.” Hadley and Libby, the aide said, had requested more information, including a “chronology of Atta’s travels.”

  But Feith’s slide show left out plenty of information—such as all the material that had been dug up by the FBI and the CIA about the Atta-in-Prague allegation. After thorough investigations, agency and bureau officials doubted that Atta had even been in Prague at the time of the alleged meeting. There was not a scrap of reliable evidence that any Iraqi “finance officer” had passed money to Atta. And Atta, the son of an Egyptian attorney, could not have been spotted at the Prague airport with his brother. In fact, he had no brother.*15 As one 9/11 Commission investigator later commented about the Feith team’s slide show, “Are you sure Elvis wasn’t there also?”

  FEITH’S exploitation of the
Atta-in-Prague allegation was a case of true believers twisting skimpy intelligence reports to create illusions of proof.

  In the chaotic days after September 11, the CIA put out an urgent all-points bulletin to allied intelligence services, asking for whatever information they had that could shed any light (no matter how faint) on the hijackings. Czech intelligence, as it happened, received an intriguing report from an informant inside the Middle Eastern community. The informant said he had seen Atta’s pictures in the paper and thought he had spotted the same man five months earlier with al-Ani outside the Iraqi Embassy. The Czech service passed along its informant’s claim to the CIA. The Czechs also soon forwarded a surveillance photo taken outside the Iraqi Embassy that day that showed an unidentified Middle Eastern–looking man, who, they suggested, might have been the 9/11 hijacker.

  “We knew right away that’s not Atta,” said one U.S. counterterrorism official who examined the photo when it arrived at Langley. “The guy [in the photo] was bigger—a broad-shouldered guy in a leather jacket. He looked sort of like an Albanian thug. Atta was a little scrawny guy. There’s no way it was Atta.” The FBI and CIA technical labs analyzed the photo. They enlarged the image, scrutinized it, and compared it to all available shots of Atta. These labs tended not to issue definitive judgments. So they did not conclusively rule out the possibility that the unidentified fellow in the picture was Atta. Yet both the bureau and the agency’s photo analysts reported that this person was probably not the 9/11 hijacker. Still, the slight wiggle room in their conclusion allowed Atta-in-Prague proponents—including those in the vice president’s office and the Pentagon—to hang on to this uncorroborated single-source claim.

  The FBI dug deeper. Agents reviewing Atta’s travel records saw that he had left the United States twice in 2001: in January, to confer with Ramzi Binalshibh, his terrorist accomplice in Germany, and in July, to meet Binalshibh in Spain. On both occasions, Atta traveled under his own name with his own passport. The bureau couldn’t find evidence that he had ever used an alias or that he had left the United States anytime in April, when the supposed Prague meeting occurred. On April 4, 2001, five days before his alleged rendezvous with al-Ani, Atta had been photographed by a surveillance camera cashing an $8,000 check at a bank in Virginia Beach, Virginia. On April 11, Atta and another of the September 11 hijackers, Marwan al-Shehhi, had leased an apartment in Coral Springs, Florida. In between—on April 6, 9, 10, and 11—Atta’s cell phone was repeatedly used to make phone calls in Florida.

  There was not one substantiated fact that indicated Atta had been in Prague on April 9—or anytime in 2001. “We looked at this real hard because, obviously, if it were true, it would be huge,” one senior U.S. law enforcement official told Newsweek at the end of April 2002. “But nothing has matched up.”

  Wolfowitz, though, refused to let go of the Atta-in-Prague charge. In the summer of 2002, he summoned to his office Pasquale D’Amuro, the chief of FBI counterterrorism, and a senior agent to grill both about the Atta photograph and the Prague story. Questioning the pair intensely, he forced the FBI officials to admit that the FBI couldn’t account for Atta’s precise whereabouts every day of the week of the purported Prague meeting. So, Wolfowitz persisted, wasn’t it theoretically possible that Atta had hastily flown out of the United States under an alias, had a short visit with al-Ani in Prague, and then quickly returned to America to continue his 9/11 plotting? Yes, it was “possible”—anything was “possible”—the FBI officials told the deputy defense secretary, according to a law enforcement colleague of theirs. That was all Wolfowitz and his allies inside Feith’s shop needed. If it was possible, it was believable.

  The White House would never officially embrace the Atta-in-Prague charge. Yet Cheney and others would continue to refer to the unconfirmed meeting as a reason to suspect that Saddam had been connected to 9/11. CIA officers and FBI agents, however, would roll their eyes whenever they heard an administration official cite the Atta–al-Ani meeting. None, though, would challenge the policy makers. “Who is going to question the vice president when he keeps espousing this shit?” asked the U.S. counterterrorism official who investigated the Atta issue. “Nobody at the FBI or CIA is going to speak up and say, stop the bullshit.”*16

  THE Atta-in-Prague story lived on—at least in the minds of Cheney, Libby, and senior Pentagon officials.

  Other parts of Feith’s slide show were equally dubious. One slide referred to the fact that Abdul Rahman Yasin, a conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, had fled to Iraq after that attack. It asserted (à la Laurie Mylroie) that this was evidence of Iraqi “facilitation” of that attack. Another slide displayed the story of Ahmad Hikmat Shakir, an Iraqi national who worked as an airport greeter in Kuala Lampur and had escorted two 9/11 hijackers in January 2000 when they arrived for a key al-Qaeda planning session in the Malaysian capital. Shakir had drawn the attention of U.S. intelligence officials. Wolfowitz was immersed in the details of the case. But CIA officials could find no connection between Shakir and the Iraqi regime. He was an Iraqi national, but al-Qaeda members and collaborators came from virtually every country in the Middle East. Fifteen of the nineteen September 11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. The citizenship of the hijackers and their accomplices was hardly evidence of government complicity in the attacks.

  One key Baghdad–bin Laden “contact” in the Feith briefing involved an alleged July 1996 meeting between the director of Iraqi intelligence, Mani abd-al-Rashid al-Tikriti, and Osama bin Laden on the al-Qaeda leader’s farm in Sudan. But there was a problem with this report: bin Laden had left Sudan for Afghanistan nearly two months earlier. His departure from the country had been no secret. By early July 1996, the British journalist Robert Fisk had reported interviewing bin Laden in a “remote and desolate mountainous area” of Afghanistan.*17

  Conventional evidentiary niceties didn’t matter to Feith’s crew. They eschewed a business-as-usual approach to intelligence analysis and pointed that out in the first of the slides they showed Libby and Hadley. That slide insisted that there were “fundamental problems” in the way the intelligence community had been assessing information about the shadowy world of international terrorism. The CIA, Feith’s underlings claimed, was wedded to the thesis that secularist Baathists like Saddam wouldn’t cooperate with fanatical Islamists like bin Laden. If you started with such a view, Feith’s analysts argued, it was easy to dismiss or neglect evidence that was out of sync with that conformist perspective. But if you adopted an alternative view—that Iraq and al-Qaeda were actually cooperating—the available evidence looked different. Feith’s team posited, as one slide noted, that al-Qaeda and Baghdad had developed a “mature” relationship and were able to conceal their alliance. There was no “juridical evidence” to verify the al-Qaeda–Iraq connection, the Feith team argued, because both parties to the devious pact had hidden the ties well. Wisps and crumbs were the best one could expect.

  The Feith analysts were essentially claiming that because al-Qaeda and Iraq had joined together in a clandestine partnership to attack the United States, there would be little, if any, evidence to prove the conspiracy. “When operational security is very good,” the opening slide in the Feith team’s briefing read, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.’’ That certainly was a contention that could not be disproved.

  THE “absence of evidence” line—not coincidentally—was a mantra for Donald Rumsfeld. Imperious and cocksure, Rumsfeld had come into office with a deep-seated distrust of the U.S. intelligence community. Like Cheney, the secretary’s old friend and former deputy, Rumsfeld, as well as Wolfowitz and Feith, were convinced the CIA was blind to the hidden threats the country was facing. This distrust dated to Cold War days, when Rumsfeld and other hard-liners (like Richard Perle and Wolfowitz) suspected the agency was underestimating the Soviet threat. The skepticism didn’t dissipate with the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1998, Rumsfeld chaired a national commission on missile defense and concluded that
the CIA was insufficiently attuned to the possibilities that a rogue state might lob a missile at an American city. Rumsfeld’s view was that the CIA was frequently too rigid or too timid—or maybe both.

  In the summer of 2001, Rumsfeld called a group of influential Washington lobbyists and consultants, including Haley Barbour and Vin Weber, into his office. It was an odd meeting. What insights, wondered one participant, could lobbyists offer Rumsfeld about the national security issues on his plate? As it turned out, Rumsfeld used the occasion to rail at the CIA. “He kept talking about how what he was getting from the CIA was out of date and wasn’t any good,” recalled one attendee. On the wall of Rumsfeld’s conference room was a huge map of the world, with the states possessing nuclear bombs and weapons of mass destruction highlighted. Rumsfeld had a solution for his dilemma. “I’m going to create my own intelligence agency,” he told the group.*18

  Rumsfeld already had one, the Defense Intelligence Agency. But the DIA was part of the overall intelligence community headed by George Tenet, who was constantly jockeying with Rumsfeld for control of the intelligence budget. Perhaps worse for Rumsfeld, the DIA consisted mostly of career intelligence professionals committed to policy-neutral analysis. But Rumsfeld and his deputies in the Pentagon desired creative, out-of-the-box thinking that challenged the established orthodoxies. They wanted to begin with new paradigms (which just happened to reflect their policy preferences and inclinations) and then work backward to see if there might be evidence to support these theses. This was the opposite of how intelligence analysis traditionally operated: start with the available evidence (as fragmentary and contradictory as it might be) and build upward. While there was an undeniable logic to Rumsfeld’s absence-of-evidence axiom, it could also lead policy makers astray—perhaps into believing what they wanted to believe, regardless of evidence or the absence of evidence. As Hans Blix, the chief UN weapons inspector, would later observe, the absence of evidence was not evidence of concealment either. It wasn’t evidence of anything—other than, by definition, ignorance.