Hubris

by Michael Isikoff

  Armey thought Cheney’s opening remark was odd: “He didn’t say, ‘You’re going to be with us.’ He didn’t say, ‘You’re going to be with the president.’ He said, ‘You’re going to be with me.’”

  Over the next half hour, Cheney, surrounded by aides, pointed to pictures of the aluminum tubes, showed overhead images of nuclear sites supposedly under construction, and displayed drawings of mobile biological labs and photographs of UAVs that, he suggested, could hit Israel and spread mass death. He talked about the “associations” and “relationships” between Saddam and al-Qaeda. He noted that the Iraqis could slip miniaturized biological weapons (that fit into suitcases) to terrorists, who could bring them into the United States and kill thousands.

  As Armey listened to Cheney and stared at the photos, it occurred to him—just as it had to Daschle—that he couldn’t really see anything in the pictures. They were aerial shots of buildings and other sites. Who knew what was in those buildings? Armey realized he had to rely on what Cheney was telling him. “It wasn’t very convincing,” Armey later recalled. “If I’d gotten the same briefing from President Clinton or Al Gore, I probably would have said, ‘Ah, bullshit.’ But you don’t do that with your own people.” He assumed Cheney was leveling with him; it never occurred to Armey that the vice president was not telling him the whole story.

  Armey asked few questions at the briefing; he didn’t challenge Cheney on any point. As the briefing concluded, Armey thanked Cheney and promised to mull over the matter. He didn’t commit to voting for the resolution. But he was coming around.

  ON THE House side, with most Republicans supporting the president, Democrats were squabbling among themselves. The party’s liberals were passionately opposed to giving Bush any resolution to wage war and scoffed at the administration’s briefings. “There was one run by Rumsfeld and Powell,” recalled Representative Bob Filner, a Democrat from San Diego. “They treated us like kids. They had all these military people standing around. It gave the thing an aura of authority. You’d feel stupid challenging them. They brought in one of those aluminum tubes. It was nothing. My attitude was ‘You’re taking us to war on that little tube?’ I got up and walked out.” Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, another liberal Democrat, had the same complaint: “Here were Tenet, Rumsfeld, Powell, various undersecretaries. They would never get into the nitty-gritty of the reliability of their sources. It would be ‘A source said this or that.’ Well, who is this source? Why do we believe this source?”

  But other Democrats were being tugged in a different direction. The party’s leaders mounted their own briefings for House Democrats. These were conducted by the party’s foreign policy wonks, the men and women who had shaped national security strategy for Bill Clinton. Most had grown increasingly frustrated with Iraqi recalcitrance in the 1990s and largely agreed that Saddam posed a danger. The briefings proved enormously important. Richard Holbrooke, Clinton’s UN ambassador, talked about how Clinton had changed U.S. policy from containment to regime change and that, in his view, Saddam was the most dangerous man in the world. Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst who had handled Iraq policy on Clinton’s National Security Council, warned that Saddam might well be able to develop a nuclear bomb within a few years and that containment was no longer feasible. Dennis Ross, who had been Clinton’s top Middle East negotiator, said that the Iraqi people would rejoice if Saddam were overthrown. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright reinforced the message that Saddam must be dealt with: he was developing nuclear weapons, and deterrence was not a viable option. Most of these Clinton veterans would, after the war, point to caveats and qualifiers in their advice. They claimed they had never intended to back a war in which the president would invade without a broad international coalition, without enough troops, without engaging in sufficient postwar planning. But their bottom-line message—that military force was the only permanent solution—was what counted most in these crucial days.

  For some of the Democrats, the most persuasive briefer was a plainspoken, nonpartisan weapons expert named David Kay. He boasted credentials that few other briefers could claim. As a UN weapons inspector in Iraq in the early 1990s, he had dealt with the Iraqis and knew how evasive they could be. Kay had repeatedly confronted Iraqi officials, challenging them when he suspected they weren’t telling him the truth, and not notifying the Iraqis where he and his team were about to inspect. He hadn’t minded bending—or breaking—the rules. In one dramatic incident that drew worldwide attention, Kay and his inspections team of several dozen had been forced out of an Iraqi government building after discovering documents indicating that Iraq, prior to the first Persian Gulf War, had been proceeding toward building a nuclear bomb (despite Baghdad’s insistence it had not). The Iraqis ordered Kay to relinquish the records before departing the scene. Kay refused, and a standoff ensued in the parking lot that lasted four days. As armed Iraqi troops surrounded Kay and the inspectors, Kay and his colleagues used satellite phones to fax the crucial documents back to the United Nations, proving that the Iraqis had had a more extensive nuclear program than they acknowledged.

  In his briefings to Democrats in the fall of 2002, Kay recounted this and other incidents to show that the U.S. government couldn’t really trust the Iraqis to come clean. He also estimated that Saddam was in a position to spend up to $2 billion a year of his oil-for-food funds on illicit weapons programs. The only guaranteed way of disarming Saddam, and making sure he never got a nuclear bomb, was regime change, Kay said. Anything else, including relying on UN inspections, would entail risk and might not be sufficiently effective. “What mattered most to me was the fear of nuclear weapons,” recalled Representative Henry Waxman, a liberal Democrat who would end up supporting Bush’s resolution. “And these people were influential.”

  BY THE end of September, the president’s war resolution was no sure thing. The White House had trimmed it back, dumping the language that authorized Bush to go to war to achieve stability in the region. Still, the White House faced a threat. Senator Joe Biden and two Republican senators on his foreign relations committee—Richard Lugar and Chuck Hagel—were pushing an alternative that would narrow the president’s authority further. Under their proposal, Bush would be able to attack Iraq only for the purpose of destroying Iraq’s WMDs and only after seeking UN approval. If the United Nations said no, Bush would have to come back to Congress and demonstrate that the Iraqi weapons threat was so “grave” that only military action could eliminate it. The Biden-Lugar measure was attracting support from both Democrats and Republicans. And, according to Biden, he and his allies were getting backdoor advice and encouragement from the administration’s reluctant warriors: Powell and Armitage. The White House was worried about Biden’s endeavor, and Bush was furious. “I don’t want a resolution such as this that ties my hands,” he told Senator Trent Lott. The president, according to Lott, gave him an emphatic order: “Derail the Biden legislation and make sure its language never sees the light of day.”

  But it was Dick Gephardt, the Democratic leader in the House and past and future presidential candidate, who derailed the bipartisan effort. He had already said he thought Iraq was a threat and that he was open to backing the president. He would later recall that he wasn’t comfortable with the administration’s resolution, but he felt at the time that he had few options. His party was in the minority in the House. At any moment, the House Republicans could put the president’s bill to a vote on the floor, and it would pass—with a number of Democrats signing on. He had little room for maneuvering, and in negotiations with the White House he angled for small changes in the resolution. “At some point, the White House said, ‘This is as good as it gets,’ ” Gephardt recalled, “and I became convinced we couldn’t get more. You had to make a decision whether you were for giving the president the authority or not. Everything else was window dressing.”

  Gephardt’s thinking had been shaped by the former Clinton national security aides, including Holbrooke,
Pollack, and James Steinberg, who were arguing Saddam had to be confronted. But Biden and other Democrats wondered if another factor was influencing Gephardt: presidential politics. Gephardt, an earnest and dogged politician, was determined to run in 2004. And, like others in his party, including Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, he had a daunting post-9/11 political problem. Eleven years earlier, he had voted against the first Persian Gulf War. If he cast a similar vote now, he could expect to be tagged by Republicans as soft and too hesitant to use military force. Gephardt reached an agreement with the president’s negotiators. At 1:15 in the afternoon on October 2, the White House held a Rose Garden ceremony with a crowd of senators and representatives from both parties to announce a resolution had been finalized. Standing right next to Bush, along with Hastert and Lott, was Gephardt.

  Gephardt had been urged by his political advisers to be by Bush’s side at the White House that day. But the move rankled plenty of congressional Democrats. On Capitol Hill, Gephardt held a meeting of House Democrats and gave an impassioned speech. Iraq posed a serious threat, he insisted. He went on to say (as he subsequently recalled), “I’m sorry he’s the president. I didn’t vote for him. But we’re in a tough spot.” He wasn’t asking for a party-line vote. Rather, he told them, “Figure out what you believe and don’t be political. I’ll never mention this vote to you again.” He knew that many in the room were livid with him.

  “His message for us was implicit,” Representative Jim McGovern said. “He did not want the Democrats to be blamed for the next attack.” Representative Henry Waxman thought Gephardt was arguing that Democrats had no choice but to go along with Bush on Iraq: “ ‘Don’t even try to fight the White House—keep it from becoming an issue in the election.’ He was thinking about running for president, and he decided to be for it.”

  Gephardt’s decision to back the president’s resolution killed Biden’s bipartisan alternative in the Senate and guaranteed a victory for the White House. When Biden consulted with Senate Republicans, they all said the same thing: How can we be to the left of Dick Gephardt? Biden’s effort to impose conditions on Bush’s march to war was finished. He didn’t bother saying anything to Gephardt. “I was angry,” Biden later remarked. “I was frustrated. But I never second-guess another man’s political judgment.”

  BY NOW Armey was being muscled by his own aides. His chief of staff laid it out for him: “This war is going to happen with you or without you.” The train was leaving the station, no matter what he said or did. Armey concluded, he later said, that he could “participate in the process and give it guidance, or I could be a cranky voice on the outside and lose control.” Armey decided to get on the train. He agreed to introduce the Iraq resolution on the floor of the House.

  TYLER DRUMHELLER, the genial, heavyset CIA veteran who was chief of the Directorate of Operations’ European Division, was sent on a sensitive mission in late September—to a Georgetown restaurant. Drumheller was due to have his monthly lunch with the Washington station chief for Germany’s BND, or Federal Intelligence Service. But this time his boss, James Pavitt, the chief of the DO, wanted him to push the Germans about a particularly sensitive issue: a mysterious Iraqi defector under their control. His code name was Curveball.

  The reports by this one defector had become the primary basis for one of the administration’s most significant claims: that Iraq had built a fleet of mobile biological labs. The White House had publicly cited this charge, saying that Saddam was now capable of cooking up anthrax and other deadly agents on movable trailers that would never be found by weapons inspectors because they were constantly on the go. But Pavitt was concerned. The CIA had never talked to Curveball and had no idea how credible he was. It didn’t even know his name.

  Drumheller and the German station chief met at Georgetown’s Sea Catch restaurant, and the CIA man delicately raised the subject: Could the agency, he asked, interview Curveball directly?

  No, the German replied, there was no point to any American questioning Curveball.

  Why not?

  “You don’t want to see him,” the German told Drumheller. “The guy’s crazy.” Speaking to him would be a “waste of time.” The German intelligence service was not even sure he was telling the truth. “We think he’s had a nervous breakdown,” the BND station chief said. “We think he’s a fabricator.” But, the German said to Drumheller, officially the BND still supported Curveball as a credible source. If the BND were asked about Curveball’s problems or any concerns it had about him, the service would deny all of this. Drumheller was taken aback. He realized that Curveball could be a time bomb.

  Only a few years earlier, the Iraqi defector had been a huge catch for the Germans. He was a dark-haired chemical engineer, with a young wife and child, who had arrived in Germany in 1999 seeking asylum. He told German authorities that he had embezzled money from the Iraqi government and would be imprisoned or killed if sent home. He was classified an exile and sent to a refugee center near Nuremberg. Then, as the Los Angeles Times would discover years later, the defector soon changed his story and told the Germans that he had once worked on mobile biological weapons labs in Iraq. He maintained that Saddam had several such trucks and that one had been concocting deadly germ weapons since 1997. The BND debriefed him and shared his reports with the Defense Intelligence Agency, which then spread them through the U.S. intelligence establishment.

  From January 2000 to September 2001, the DIA disseminated almost a hundred reports based on Curveball’s claims—reports that became part of intelligence briefings for senior Bush administration officials. And the reports became firmer as time went on. At first, the DIA reported that Curveball’s claims “suggested” Iraq had a biological weapons program, and an early DIA report stated, “We cannot confirm whether Iraq has produced…biological agents.” Yet as the White House’s interest in Iraqi weapons programs grew, the reports became more definitive. By October 2001, relying principally on Curveball, the CIA’s WINPAC—its analytical shop specializing in weapons proliferation—was reporting the existence of “mobile BW agent production plants” as fact, not supposition. And White House officials looking to catch Saddam red-handed embraced Curveball’s reports of mobile bioweapons laboratories. An NSC staffer later recalled the excitement stirred within the White House by these intelligence reports: “We really thought the trailers were the smoking gun. When I saw that, I thought, ‘We got him.’ We were like, ‘The bastard, we nailed his ass.’ And finally, the agency was giving us something concrete.”

  But the Curveball operation was loaded with problems—not least of all Curveball himself. The reports based on his information came out of an awkward process—a linguistic version of the children’s game of “telephone.” Curveball usually spoke to the Germans in Arabic, and his information was translated into German. Then DIA officers translated the reports from German into English before sharing them with other U.S. intelligence services. Worse, the BND had not allowed U.S. intelligence direct access to Curveball, claiming he hated Americans. So the U.S. intelligence community was depending on double translations from a source they couldn’t personally evaluate. And the DIA took no steps to ascertain Curveball’s veracity. Years later, a DIA official told a White House commission on WMD intelligence that the DIA saw itself as merely a “conduit” for Curveball’s Arabic-to-German-to-English reporting. “The whole handling of Curveball was a farce,” said a CIA officer in the Counterproliferation Division who monitored the Curveball episode. “But it was a DIA operation. Our attitude was, it’s their problem.”

  And there were red flags concerning the Iraqi from the outset. In May 2000, Les, the Defense Department physician detailed to the CPD and one of the intelligence community’s leading experts on biological weapons, was able to meet Curveball—briefly. Curveball had told his German handlers that he had been an eyewitness to a 1998 biological weapons accident in which twelve technicians had died from exposure to biological agents. Les was dispatched to Germany to determine whether C
urveball had been exposed to any biological agents or had been vaccinated. He was introduced to Curveball as a German for the sole purpose of obtaining a blood sample. He wasn’t permitted to say anything to the defector, only to take his blood. The subsequent medical tests were inconclusive. But Les returned to Langley with a disturbing report. First, he had noticed, Curveball spoke English after all. The Germans had told the Americans he didn’t and that was one reason why U.S. intelligence officials couldn’t question him. Second, despite the fact that they met in the morning, Les had noticed that Curveball smelled of liquor. He seemed to be suffering from a hangover. Les wondered if Curveball might be a drunk.

  In early 2001, there was another warning of sorts. The CIA station chief in Berlin sent a message to headquarters: a BND official had said that Curveball was “out of control” and couldn’t be located. And in April 2002, England’s MI6, which was also receiving the Curveball material, told the CIA that it had come across inconsistencies in Curveball’s reporting. The British intelligence service reported it was “not convinced that Curveball is a wholly reliable source” and that “elements of [Curveball’s] behavior strike us as typical of individuals we would normally assess as fabricators.” But MI6, like the BND, officially continued to back Curveball. And neither the CIA nor the DIA dumped him. His reports on a fleet of mobile weapons labs kept circulating. “We were watching the whole Curveball thing in horror,” recalled the Counterproliferation Division staffer. “We knew it was bad from the start. We felt powerless, but we also wondered if maybe we didn’t know everything. In the aftermath of 9/11, could you afford to be negligent and dismiss a potential source as just another screwball? Most of our sources were strange in one way or another. Still, we couldn’t believe this kept going on and on.”