Hubris

by Michael Isikoff

  McLaughlin’s response had been telling: “In the foreseeable future, given the conditions we understand now, the likelihood I think would be low.” But if Saddam were to be attacked, McLaughlin added, the odds would be “pretty high” that he would retaliate with such weapons.

  McLaughlin had also indicated that the CIA had concluded that Saddam had no intention of conducting terrorist attacks against the United States with conventional weapons or biological or chemical weapons. But the agency thought, he might assist anti-American terrorists to hit the United States with such weapons—if the United States attacked him.

  This may have been no more than guesswork on the CIA’s part. But Levin believed it offered quite a different picture from the one the White House was presenting to the public. In recent days, Bush had called Iraq “a threat of unique urgency.” Echoing the British white paper, Bush had said that Iraq “could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as forty-five minutes.” He had warned that “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.” Yet in this private hearing, the CIA’s number two official had said that it was unlikely Saddam would do any of this unless the United States invaded Iraq.

  “This was the most relevant possible testimony you could have,” Levin later said. If this testimony could be declassified, Levin thought at the time, it could change the contours of the Iraq debate. Graham agreed it should be made public.

  Three days later, with Congress still debating the Iraq resolution, the CIA responded to Graham’s request. In a letter for public release signed by McLaughlin on behalf of Tenet, the agency declassified some of its judgments about Saddam’s WMD-related decision making. The letter noted that Baghdad “for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW against the United States.” If Saddam thought a U.S.-led attack was coming, the letter said, “he probably would become much less constrained in adopting terrorist actions.” Moreover, Saddam “might” take “the extreme step of assisting Islamist terrorists in conducting a WMD attack against the United States” as “a last chance to exact vengeance,” if Iraq were under assault from the United States. The letter also declassified Levin’s exchange with McLaughlin from the classified October 2 hearing.

  But the CIA, in something of a preemptive strike, included in the letter other information that seemed to bolster the administration’s case. “We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qa’ida going back a decade,” the letter said, during which the two parties “discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression.” It was the information from the Feith briefing—the same reporting that the CIA until recently had largely dismissed as unreliable. The CIA referred to “reporting” that Iraq had provided training to al-Qaeda concerning “poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.” This was a reference to the al-Libi allegations—which the DIA had raised questions about months earlier and which may have been extracted under torture. The Tenet-McLaughlin letter made no mention of these doubts from intelligence community analysts. They were shoving into public view the same intelligence that had been the subject of intense debate and about which there was anything but a consensus.

  Graham released the letter the next day. A New York Times front-page story called the letter a “new element” in the intensifying congressional debate over the Iraq resolution. But Tenet by this point was playing damage control—a highly unusual role for a CIA director. He had put out a statement claiming, “There is no inconsistency between our view of Saddam’s growing threat and the view as expressed by the President.” Tenet, who rarely talked to reporters directly, even called a New York Times reporter on deadline to ensure this point would make it into the paper—and it did.

  Levin was enraged. “The head of the CIA was saying there was no difference between that CIA testimony and the administration,” he later recalled. “That’s a fabrication and bullshit. It was wrong and totally inappropriate for him to say that. That was important testimony, and they were lying about it. I believed it was likely that Saddam had chemical or biological weapons. But a lot of countries have WMDs. The question is, are they an imminent threat to you?” Levin saw the CIA’s answer to that question as “no,” and he was happy he had gotten this information into the public realm before the vote. But now Tenet was undermining his agency’s own findings—and Levin’s efforts. “I was bloody furious,” Levin said. Tenet, he thought, was acting more like a White House spinner than the director of central intelligence.

  THE day the CIA sent the letter to Senator Bob Graham, October 7, Bush was due to deliver a speech outlining the case against Iraq in Cincinnati. This would be Bush’s effort to seal the deal as the congressional debate on the Iraq resolution headed toward a finale. The prospects for the White House looked excellent. The Biden-Lugar alternative had been shot down. The Republicans were fully behind the leader of their party; the Democrats were split. There were plenty of votes for Bush. But one last element of the White House’s lobbying campaign remained: the big speech. The president would go on national television—in prime time—and share with the public compelling evidence the U.S. government possessed. This would be Bush’s grand summation of the case for war. Neither before the invasion nor after would he again lay out the argument in such detail.

  The White House wanted the speech loaded with as much ammunition as possible. So for days John Gibson, the White House speechwriter, had been doing what he had done prior to the UN speech: putting into the draft whatever alarming material the CIA would permit him to use. And even though Gibson had been told not to use the Niger charge for the UN speech, he now saw that it was part of the NIE. If it was in the NIE, he figured, it was good enough to use. He included it in a draft, and chief speechwriter Michael Gerson signed off. The pair, wanting to make the speech as powerful as possible, proposed a line saying that it would take only one canister of the chemical agents Saddam possessed to kill everyone in New York City—or wipe out some other major American city. The speechwriters pushed the CIA to give them a way to say this, so they could render the Iraq threat as frightening and close to home as possible. But the CIA wouldn’t go along. There were too many variables, agency officials explained. Gibson and Gerson lost the line.

  They also lost Niger. On October 4, the NSC had sent a draft of the Cincinnati speech to the agency for vetting. It contained a sentence that said that Iraq “has been caught attempting to purchase up to 500 metric tons of uranium oxide from Africa.” It was an overstatement of the dubious language in the NIE. Iraq had certainly not been “caught” doing anything in Africa. And the CIA had even walked away from the Niger charge the day after the NIE was done. During his October 2 testimony to the Senate intelligence committee, McLaughlin had said of the recent British white paper, “I think they stretched a little bit beyond where we would stretch…on the points about Iraq seeking uranium from various African locations. We’ve looked at those reports, and we don’t think they are very credible.” (And during that testimony, Robert Walpole, the CIA official who had managed the production of the NIE, had been sitting right next to McLaughlin.)

  On October 5, after the CIA had reviewed this draft, a senior CIA official, the associate deputy director for intelligence for strategic programs, faxed Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley and Gerson a memo telling them to strike the reference to the uranium shopping in Africa from the Cincinnati speech: “The amount is in dispute and it is debatable whether it can be acquired from the source. We told Congress that the Brits have exaggerated this issue. Finally, the Iraqis already have 550 metric tons of uranium oxide in their inventory.” In other words, forget about it; the British were wrong to put the charge in their white paper. The president shouldn’t use it.

  But the next draft of the speech still contained the Niger charge. After the CIA received this version on October 6, the same CIA official quickly called Tenet. Then Tenet phoned H
adley and told him that his analysts thought the reporting on this allegation was weak and that Bush should not be a “fact witness” on this issue. The NSC dumped the reference. Still, the CIA sent a second fax that day to the NSC to reinforce the point: the evidence related to the Africa allegation was “weak,” the “procurement is not particularly significant to Iraq’s nuclear ambitions because the Iraqis already have a large stock of uranium oxide,” and the CIA has already told Congress that “the Africa story is overblown.” This was the fourth warning in less than a month that the CIA had sent the White House about this allegation. The Niger charge was gone—but only for the time being.

  NIGER was not the only iffy intelligence the White House wanted to place in the Cincinnati speech. During the preparation for the Cincinnati speech, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice invited White House communications aide Adam Levine into the White House Situation Room to review hundreds of photographs strewn across the conference table. They were highly classified U.S. intelligence photos that supposedly illustrated Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. Rice wanted Levine’s advice on what photos could be released with the Cincinnati speech to bolster the administration’s case.

  Levine, no expert on either intelligence or unconventional weapons, started to search through the pile and saw that all the shots had dates on the bottom. He wanted to see a recent one, figuring a current photo would have more impact. He spotted one that fit the bill: a highly detailed photo that appeared to show one of Saddam’s UAVs that could be used to deliver chemical and biological agents. But Levine noticed something: the UAV had an insignia on it. He asked one of Rice’s aides about it. It was a Czech flag, he was told. This UAV had been on display at a German air show. What, Levine asked, did this have to do with Iraq? The answer: This UAV is like the ones we believe Saddam has. Like? Not the real thing? Levine shook his head.

  As Levine continued to pore over the photos, he realized the recent ones were all similar: shots that didn’t prove anything. Aerial photographs in which the weapons or weapons site couldn’t be seen. Before-and-after photographs of sites visited by United Nations inspectors—but from 1998. “I remember having this sinking feeling,” Levine recalled. “ ‘Oh my God, I hope this isn’t all we have. We’ve got to have better stuff than this.’ ”

  Levine noticed something else that day. Inside the Situation Room, on the walls where a series of clocks showed the times at important capitals around the world—London, Tokyo, Moscow—there was one set to Baghdad time. Levine worried that word of this clock might leak—and that reporters might reasonably conclude that the decision to go to war against Iraq had already been made.

  ON THE evening of October 7, Bush took the stage at the Cincinnati Museum Center. Before him was an audience of seven hundred or so invited guests, many from the local Republican organization. Outside, a few hundred yards away, were more than a thousand antiwar protesters, who were being kept from the museum by police on horses. (A Gallup poll released the previous day showed that popular support for an invasion of Iraq had dropped from 61 percent in June to 53 percent.)

  In a stern, methodical manner, Bush depicted Iraq as a clear and present danger to the United States. Not surprisingly, he mentioned none of the doubts or dissents within the U.S. intelligence community. He called Iraq a “grave threat.” He linked the peril posed by Saddam to September 11. In the wake of those attacks, he said, the United States must “confront every threat from any source…that could bring sudden terror and suffering to America.” The Iraqi dictator, he proclaimed, “must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons.” On the WMD front, he offered a whole range of evidence. He pointed out that previous UN inspections hadn’t accounted for tens of thousands of liters of biological agents in Iraq and called this a “massive stockpile…capable of killing millions” (though UN inspectors had said that they didn’t know whether this unaccounted-for material actually existed). “We know,” Bush asserted, that Saddam has produced “thousands of tons of chemical agents.” Iraq, Bush continued, was “exploring ways” of using unmanned drones bearing chemical and biological weapons “for missions targeting the United States.”

  Bush talked about the purported partnership between al-Qaeda and Baghdad, claiming that the pair had “high-level contacts that go back a decade.” He then added, “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases.” (Bush was blending the Feith slide show and the information squeezed out of al-Libi.) Ignoring the CIA findings regarding Saddam’s attitude toward sharing his unconventional weaons with terrorist groups, Bush said, “Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists. Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.”

  Bush also raised the nuclear specter. He invoked the aluminum tubes and Saddam’s “numerous meetings” with his “nuclear holy warriors.” He said “we don’t know exactly” how close Saddam was to getting a nuclear bomb. But were Iraq able to “produce, buy or steal” an amount of enriched uranium “a little larger than a single softball,” it could have a bomb “in less than a year.” Bush then deployed Gerson’s rhetorical flourish, which Rice had road tested a month earlier: “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

  Bush didn’t advocate a military invasion—not yet. But he did dismiss other options. Inspections, sanctions, and strikes on suspected WMD sites, he asserted, hadn’t stopped the Iraqi dictator from becoming a WMD power. He called on Congress “to authorize the use of America’s military,” noting that the House and Senate were “nearing a historic vote.”

  When Bush finished the speech, the crowd gave him a two-minute ovation.

  IN ROME on the afternoon of October 7, the day of Bush’s Cincinnati speech, Elisabetta Burba, an investigative reporter for Panorama, a Milan-based newsmagazine owned by conservative Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, sat down for lunch at an upscale restaurant with an old source: Rocco Martino, the professional information peddler who had tried (unsuccessfully) to sell phony documents about a purported Niger-Iraq uranium deal to French intelligence. The two had done business in the past; Martino had once slipped Burba some papers about Islamic terrorists in the Balkans. A few days earlier, Martino had called Burba and told her he had something “very hot.” Now Martino took out a thick envelope and showed the journalist what it was: documents that he said proved that Iraq had signed a deal to buy hundreds of tons of yellowcake from Niger. Martino (who was secretly tape-recording their meeting) made a reference to Bush’s “big speech” that day. It was clear war was coming. But the two of them—Martino and Burba—could push it along, he suggested. “Let’s make this war start,” Martino told Burba. “This is a megagalactica situation.”

  Of course, Martino wanted money for this—20 million lire, or about $12,000. But Burba was not about to pay anything until she could verify the material. She said she would have to check out the documents. If they led to something, her magazine would pay. That was the practice in Italy. She flew back to Milan and started going over the documents with her husband, a historian.

  They immediately spotted all sorts of problems with the papers. There were puzzling gaps in the documents and references that didn’t seem to make sense. She started to wonder if the Niger documents were una bufala—a fraud. Still, she thought she should pursue the story. The next day, she told Panorama editor Carlo Rossella about this potential bombshell story. She proposed to fly off to Niger to check out the material. Before doing that, Rossella said, she should take the documents to the U.S. Embassy in Rome and show them to officials there. The Americans, no doubt, would know if there was anything to this deal. Rossella knew U.S. Ambassador Melvin Sembler, a shopping mall magnate who had been a fund-raiser for the Bush presidential campaign. He
placed a phone call to the embassy and arranged a meeting.

  Burba arrived at the U.S Embassy the following day, October 9, and was greeted by Ian Kelly, the press officer. He took her upstairs to his office to meet two embassy officials. They were cool—interested but careful. They wanted to know where she had gotten the material. A confidential source, she said. They said it wasn’t the embassy’s job to verify such material. But, they asked, could they have a copy? Sure, Burba said, and they photocopied the documents. But she left the embassy with no new information. Embassy officials immediately sent the copies to the State Department for review.

  Eight months after Cheney had first asked about the Niger deal, the documents that had started the Niger episode—the documents that would become the most infamous intelligence forgery of recent years—were finally in the hands of the U.S. government. But the CIA still didn’t have them.

  Before the Burba meeting, a CIA officer who worked at the embassy had been informed of the session. But Jeff Castelli, the CIA station chief, had told his subordinate not to worry about it. We know all about this phony yellowcake report, Castelli had explained. “This is bullshit we don’t have time to waste on,” he had said, according to Drumheller, the CIA’s European Division chief. Still, after the meeting, the station chief was given a set of the Niger documents—which he promptly forgot about. Castelli, Drumheller subsequently explained, was “not the most organized guy in the world. And his view was ‘This is the least important thing that’s coming across my desk now.’ He just made a mistake.” Langley wouldn’t be able to vet the documents—because the Rome station chief had essentially lost the paperwork.