Hubris
Page 14
After the 9/11 attack, the Pentagon put Rumsfeld’s mantra into practice. The CIA and FBI immediately suspected bin Laden, and within hours, they had gathered evidence directly linking al-Qaeda to the mass murder. Two of the hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, had been known to the U.S. intelligence community as bin Laden men.*19 But at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith had different presumptions. The attack, they suspected, couldn’t have been pulled off by a bunch of ragtag terrorists in Afghanistan plotting on their own. It had to have what terrorism experts called a “state sponsor”—and the most likely culprit was Iraq. Wolfowitz decried the CIA for lacking the imagination to explore the hidden truth of the attacks. But if the CIA was unable to see what needed to be seen, the Pentagon had options of its own.
Within weeks, the Pentagon leadership created a new, secret intelligence unit that would dig out the connections that the CIA had missed. The man in charge of this top-priority mission, Douglas Feith, was perhaps the most ideologically dogmatic and controversial of the neoconservatives in the new administration. A graduate of Harvard and Georgetown Law School, Feith had served on the National Security Council under Ronald Reagan and later moved to the Pentagon as an assistant to Perle. A fierce anti-Communist, Feith was also known for his unyielding stand on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. His father, a Holocaust survivor and wealthy philanthropist, had been an activist in the Betar organization, the revisionist Zionist youth group founded by the Polish firebrand Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who preached that Jews were entitled to the entire territory of the original Palestinian Mandate, including both the West and East Banks of the Jordan River. The father had passed along many of his views to his son. During the Clinton years, Feith had denounced the Oslo Peace Accords or any swap of “land for peace” with the Palestinians. His law partner, L. Marc Zell, represented West Bank settlement groups. Feith for a time did legal work for the Israeli Embassy in Washington. He was also a consultant for the 1996 “Clean Break” paper calling for the overthrow of Saddam, prepared for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Feith had a habit of irritating his Bush administration colleagues by injecting ideology—and his views of contemporary history—into policy discussions. “All he did was spout rhetoric,” said one senior NSC official, who came to despise Feith. “He would launch into these diatribes about neo-fascism…. He had no interest in problem solving.” Feith’s other mission seemed to be waging intramural bureaucratic warfare. At deputies meetings, this senior official said, Feith was bent on protecting Rumsfeld and the Pentagon’s turf, not fashioning governmentwide policies. “I’ve talked to Secretary Rrrrrumsfeld about this,” Feith would say, rolling his Rs, according to the official. “Secretary Rrrrrumsfeld has strong views about this.” At times, tensions between Feith and Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman—over matters relating to Ahmad Chalabi’s INC—grew heated, so much so that Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley at one session had to order the room cleared, the official said.
To run his new intelligence unit, Feith turned to two like-minded allies. One was David Wurmser, the young neoconservative analyst from the American Enterprise Institute, who had advocated war with Iraq, coauthored the “Clean Break” report, and once called Chalabi a “mentor.” Another member of Feith’s new team was an impish veteran Pentagon policy warrior named Michael Maloof. Like Wurmser, Maloof was a longtime Perle ally. In the late 1990s, as chief of a small Pentagon office that oversaw export controls, Maloof had infuriated National Security Agency chief Michael Hayden by launching an investigation of Hughes Electronics, a major NSA contractor, for selling satellite equipment to China. Hayden then pushed for an FBI investigation of Maloof for allegedly leaking classified information about the Hughes case to the news media. Maloof, who in his spare time conducted paramilitary “combat tracking” courses, relished this sort of interagency combat.
In 2001, Wurmser and Maloof set up shop in a small windowless office on the third floor of the Pentagon, down the hall from the War Room. The project was eventually given the title of Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group. They created giant wall charts detailing the “linkages” and “associations” among terror groups that the CIA and DIA had ignored or dismissed. To establish the case that Iraq lurked behind terror organizations around the globe, they sought raw, highly classified intelligence reports. When the intelligence agencies balked at sharing such sensitive (and often unreliable) reports, Wolfowitz fired off messages to the CIA and DIA demanding that the unfiltered reports start flowing to Wurmser and Maloof. The friction between Feith’s investigators and the intelligence agencies escalated. “The CIA was apoplectic about the work we were doing,” Maloof later said. “They were so pissed off.” The DIA, with CIA backing, “refused to give us the information, they were stonewalling us.” One day, a top aide to Admiral Thomas Wilson, the DIA chief, confronted Maloof in the hallways of the Pentagon. “We don’t like you guys looking over our shoulder,” the aide told Maloof. Maloof couldn’t have cared less. (Wilson later said that the two men didn’t have the necessary clearances and his agency wasn’t about to bend the rules.)
Soon enough, Maloof and Wurmser gained enough access to begin filling out their charts. The charts, Maloof recalled, looked “like a spiderweb” with crisscrossing lines stretching from Baghdad to the remote border jungles of Paraguay. “Iraq trains Palestinian terrorists associated with PFLP, PIJ, Hamas, ANO, PLF, Ansar al-Islam which has direct ties to Al Qaeda,” Maloof wrote in a memo entitled “Iraqi Intelligence Shifts Terror Training Location” (adding his own italicized emphasis). In a secret 150-page report, the Maloof-Wurmser team depicted the 9/11 attacks as a complex operation carried out by al-Qaeda—but assisted by the Hizbollah Shiites, financed by Saudi royals, and sponsored (if not directed) by the secular Baathists of Baghdad. “Saddam used al-Qaeda as an indirect conduit because he needed plausible deniability,” Maloof would later say, echoing the Mylroiean view of the world.
Maloof and Wurmser’s spiderwebs attracted attention from senior Bush officials. A foreign policy aide to Cheney, Samantha Ravich, came to their office and studied the charts, taking notes so she could report back to Scooter Libby. So, too, did Wolfowitz, who one day spent forty-five minutes closely examining the charts. The deputy defense secretary was especially taken with the spaghetti lines that Maloof had drawn between the Abu Nidal terrorist organization in Iraq and training camps in Lebanon. From Lebanon, the lines then crisscrossed back to al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The precise nature of these linkages was misty and, in the views of some intelligence analysts, nonsensical. The Abu Nidal organization, once a feared organization in the world of terror, was by this point essentially defunct. Still, Wolfowitz was impressed. Here were links that not even Mylroie had considered. “Great work,” Wolfowitz told the team, according to Maloof.
In search of actual evidence, Maloof sought input from one decidedly nonobjective source: Ahmad Chalabi’s INC. Perle helped set Maloof up with a liaison at the INC: Nibras Kazimi, a young college graduate who was a public affairs officer and intelligence analyst in the INC’s Washington office. Over the next few months, Kazimi fed the Feith unit claims about Saddam’s terrorism connections from INC-handled defectors—assertions that soon found their way onto the wall charts.
Maloof and Wurmser did not stay with the mission long. Maloof’s usefulness diminished in January 2002, when he was stripped of his security clearances. The nominal reason was his unauthorized contact with a woman whom he had met in Georgia, the former Soviet Union territory. (He later married her.) Then Wurmser went to work for John Bolton, the hard-line undersecretary of state for arms control and international security. With Wurmser gone and Maloof hindered, Feith brought in Chris Carney, a Pennsylvania State University associate professor of political science and naval reservist, and Tina Shelton, a DIA analyst.
Carney and Shelton continued the work of Maloof and Wurmser, sharing their most promising data with Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. The team’s efforts soon put the
m in a headlong clash with the CIA. In June 2002, in response to repeated prodding from the White House and the vice president’s office, the CIA finished and circulated a classified report, “Iraq and al-Qaida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship.” The report was described in a cover note as “purposely aggressive in seeking to draw connections.” But analysts in the Near East and South Asia division of the agency’s intelligence directorate were offended by the whole process. They saw the document as an abandonment of the agency’s “traditional analytic approach” in which intelligence had to be confirmed “with multiple sources” and based on “strongly supported reporting,” according to a later study by the Senate intelligence committee. The NESA analysts believed the report had inflated “sporadic, wary contacts” between two independent actors into a “relationship,” albeit murky, that didn’t really exist. There was even a confidential complaint filed over the document with the CIA’s ombudsman for politicization, an office set up to guard against undue political pressures. The ombudsman interviewed twenty-four analysts and later told Senate investigators that “about a half a dozen [analysts] mentioned ‘pressure’ from the administration; several others did not use that word, but spoke in a context that implied it.” But the CIA ombudsman concluded that nothing untoward had happened.
Still, the CIA’s “Murky Relationship” report—an effort by the agency to push the envelope on the critical topic of Saddam’s alleged ties to al-Qaeda—wasn’t good enough for the Feith cell. Shelton, the DIA analyst assigned to the unit, wrote a memo noting the report
provides evidence from numerous intelligence sources over a decade on the interactions between Iraq and al-Qaida. In this regard, the report is excellent. Then in its interpretation of this information, CIA attempts to discredit, dismiss, or downgrade much of this reporting, resulting in inconsistent conclusions in many instances. Therefore, the CIA report should be read for content only—and CIA’s interpretation ought to be ignored.
The battle continued through the summer of 2002, as the Bush White House was preparing to move on Iraq. On August 15, the Feith team presented its slide show to George Tenet and other senior CIA officials. Tenet listened politely for about ten minutes and then walked out.*20 Five days later, the Feith analysts returned to Langley to discuss the draft of an updated version of the agency’s Saddam–al-Qaeda report, renamed “Iraqi Support for Terrorism.” The report drew a distinction between the “patron-client pattern between Iraq and its Palestinian surrogates” and the arm’s-length relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda, which “appears to more closely resemble that of two independent actors trying to exploit each other.” The report also found “no credible information that Baghdad had foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks or any other al-Qaida strike.” Once again, the Feith team complained. “We raised numerous objections,” they wrote in a memo after the meeting. Among them was that the draft made “no reference to the key issue of Atta.”
If the CIA wouldn’t listen, Feith and his team knew where they would get a more sympathetic reception: the White House.
DAYS after his staffers presented their slide show at the White House to Libby and Hadley, Feith made the pitch himself. On a Saturday morning in September, Hadley had convened a meeting in the White House Situation Room to ensure that all the administration’s witnesses who were about to testify before Congress—Powell, Tenet, Rumsfeld—were on the same page regarding Iraq. Although Hadley had called the meeting, it was soon taken over by Feith. When a CIA officer pointed out that the available intelligence didn’t support an assertion that the administration was planning to make about Iraq’s link to al-Qaeda, Feith launched into a lengthy tutorial about the connections alleged in his secret unit’s slide show: the meeting in Sudan, Atta’s visits to Prague, and the rest. As he went on, Feith grew impassioned and accusatory, according to two officials present. He got up out of his chair and practically stepped on the toes of the officials standing behind him in the crowded room. “I know you guys don’t believe this,” he said to the CIA officials. But the agency, he claimed was “not putting it together…, not connecting the dots,” one of the participants recalled.
When a CIA official mentioned that members of Congress might be skeptical about some of his claims, Feith brushed him aside. “Well, if some congressman is going to nitpick about this, he’s going to look really dumb,” one person at the meeting remembered Feith saying. Larry Wilkerson, Powell’s chief of staff, was astounded by what he viewed as Feith’s arrogance. Feith’s attitude toward the CIA officials present, according to Wilkerson, was, “You’re all just dumb shits, I’m the smartest guy in this room.” Wilkerson couldn’t believe that Hadley was letting Feith dominate the discussion. “Finally,” Wilkerson recalled, “Steve said something to the effect of ‘Well, you know, that’s not really what we came here to discuss. We should get back on the agenda. Why don’t you sit down?’ ”
Paul Pillar, the national intelligence officer in charge of the Near East, was also stunned by Feith’s presentation. As he saw it, Feith was a “zealot” and the work of his Iraq intelligence cell was a fraud: “It was a deliberate effort to try to stitch things together to try to make a case. It had nothing to do with intelligence analysis as I understood it—which is ultimately to try to get at the truth.”
Feith later said he had no recollection of this White House meeting. He insisted that unlike Wolfowitz he had not been “immersed” in the details of the al-Qaeda–Iraq issue. But he had no apologies for his efforts to challenge the CIA’s analysis on terrorism. The agency, he maintained, was doing its own spinning. “They would say an intelligence report was unconfirmed if they didn’t believe it, but they wouldn’t say it was unconfirmed if it fit their theories,” he said. “We had our theories. Other people had their theories.” He was adamant that he and his researchers never distorted the intelligence: “I think of myself as a very careful person and an honest one.”
Many of the unconfirmed details peddled by the secret diggers of Feith’s backdoor shop—with the notable exception of the Atta-in-Prague allegation—would not be shared with the public. His team was cooking up material on the Saddam–al-Qaeda connection for consumption within the national security community—to reinforce the case for war among the policy makers. But in the days to come, the White House would seize on yet another loose strand of intelligence in the agency’s al-Qaeda files to promote a new claim about the supposed Baghdad–bin Laden connection—one even more frightening than those Feith had been advancing but just as dubious.
Trust me on this.
—VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY
7
A Tale of Two Sources
BY LATE September, the White House was intensifying its campaign. Nearly every day, administration officials were trekking up to Capitol Hill to offer briefings, hoping to coax unsure lawmakers and bolster those already aboard. They were citing new claims—about Saddam’s providing chemical weapons training for al-Qaeda and building a fleet of mobile biological weapons labs. At the same time, Bush seemed to be viewing the cause in stark and personal terms.
On the afternoon of September 26, 2002, Bush was at a Houston fund-raiser for Republican senatorial candidate John Cornyn. Surrounded by old friends from Texas, he made his most bellicose public comments about Saddam yet. There would be “no discussion, no debate, no negotiation” with the Iraqi dictator. He repeated the standard litany: Saddam had tortured his own citizens, gassed the Kurds, invaded his neighbors: “There’s no doubt his hatred is mainly directed at us. There’s no doubt he can’t stand us.” But one line in this speech grabbed worldwide attention: “After all, this is a guy that tried to kill my dad at one time.”
Bush was referring to a plot by a group of Iraqis and Kuwaitis who had been arrested walking in the Kuwaiti desert one night in April 1993. They were later charged by the Kuwaiti government with conspiring to assassinate George H. W. Bush with a car bomb during a ceremonial visit the former president and his family had made to Kuwait that month
. George W. Bush had been invited on the trip but had begged off because he was busy as the managing partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team. But those family members who did go—and who might have also been killed in an assassination attempt—included his mother, two of his brothers, and his wife, Laura.
The Kuwaitis rested their case on the discovery of a car bomb and a confession made by the alleged ringleader, Wali al-Ghazali, after four days in Kuwaiti custody. Al-Ghazali later testified that he had been recruited barely a week before the Bush visit by an Iraqi intelligence agent who had pressured him to arrange the assassination plot and provided him with the car bomb. But much about the case was hazy. Amnesty International questioned whether al-Ghazali had been tortured, a practice not unheard of in Kuwaiti jails. A classified CIA report, leaked at the time to The Boston Globe, expressed skepticism about the Kuwaiti government’s claims, noting that Kuwait might have “cooked the books.” No testimony or documents ever tied Saddam to the plot. “I had no evidence of any direct order” by Saddam, the U.S. ambassador to Kuwait at the time, Edward “Skip” Gnehm, acknowledged in a 2006 interview (although Gnehm did endorse the Kuwaiti verdict). The FBI concluded that the car bomb uncovered by the Kuwaitis matched the known design of Iraqi-made bombs. The forensic evidence was deemed strong enough by President Clinton to order a Tomahawk missile attack on the headquarters of the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi intelligence service, in June 1993 in retaliation for the supposed assassination attempt.*21