Hubris

by Michael Isikoff

  AFTER a week of debating, on October 10, the House was poised to vote on the legislation that would grant Bush the power to use military force “as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq” and to “enforce all relevant” UN Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.

  Dick Armey, who had questioned the need for a war and Bush’s motivations, gave the final emotional address before the members voted. Armey echoed the arguments that Cheney had made to him two weeks earlier. He talked about how Saddam, with his “ongoing working relationships with a myriad of evil terrorist organizations,” could provide them with biological weapons that would be concealed in suitcases that could be left “in a train depot, a service station, an airport.” He declared that Saddam could attack Israel at any time and “to me, an attack on Israel is an attack on America.” Armey closed his remarks with an impassioned plea to the president to use his new power wisely. Choking up with tears, Armey referred to American troops and said, “Mr. President, we trust to you the best we have to give.”

  The measure passed easily in the House on a 296-to-133 vote, with all Republicans but six voting for the measure. The Democrats split, with 126 voting nay and 81 siding with Bush and Gephardt.

  Armey had succumbed to Cheney’s pressure. He had decided to be the good soldier, the loyal partisan. But this vote weighed on him. For weeks afterward, he would agonize about it and try to convince himself that he hadn’t actually voted for a war. He wanted to believe that he had merely given Bush the option to use military force, to strengthen the president’s hand in pursuing a diplomatic solution to the Saddam problem. “I’ll tell my grandchildren that,” he later said. “I’ll split that hair until hell freezes over.” But Armey suspected he was lying to himself. In December of that year, he would be driving along a stretch of Texas highway when a country song would come on about a fellow who looked in the mirror and saw a stranger. The line hit him hard. He had voted for the war against his better instincts, Armey now thought, and he had become that stranger. Disappointed with himself, Armey was thankful that a year previously, he had decided to leave the House at the end of this term.

  Representative Walter Jones, a conservative Republican from a heavily military district in North Carolina, voted for the resolution. But after he left the House floor, as he later recounted, he was troubled. A member of the House armed services committee, Jones had never been quite convinced by the briefings he had received. There was something about the way the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the rest of the Pentagon brass (including Rumsfeld) had answered the questions that told him they knew less than they were letting on. Jones was unsettled by the atmospherics that had surrounded the Iraq debate. It had been rushed, hectic, and at times too emotional. “There’s something about this. I can’t put my finger on it,” he said to his chief of staff that night. “But I just don’t feel good about this vote.”

  A DAY after the House voted, the resolution came up for a vote in the Senate. Every Republican but one was solidly behind the measure. On the floor of the Senate, Republican John McCain proclaimed that Saddam “has developed stocks of germs and toxins in sufficient quantities to kill the entire population of the Earth multiple times. He has placed weapons laden with these poisons on alert to fire at his neighbors within minutes.” The vote on the resolution, he said, “will reveal whether we are brave and wise or reluctant, self-doubting.” Senator Hillary Clinton echoed McCain and the president in outlining her support for the resolution: “Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.”

  Liberal Democrats passionately denounced the resolution. “What this resolution does,” Senator Paul Wellstone declared, “is give the president the authority for a possible go-it-alone, unilateral military strike and ground war…. Our focus should be going to the United Nations Security Council.”

  Senator Joe Biden argued that Iraq’s WMDs “do not pose an imminent threat to our national security.” But he called the resolution a “march to peace and security” and said he would vote for it. If Bush were handed this authority, he reasoned, Colin Powell could cajole the Security Council to produce a tough new resolution that would compel Saddam to accept intrusive WMD inspections. And that, Biden argued, would decrease the prospects of war. “Thank God for Colin Powell,” he proclaimed.

  Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican and Vietnam vet, voiced his mixed feelings. A war in Iraq would be no cakewalk, he warned: “We should not be seduced by the expectations of ‘dancing in the streets’ after Saddam’s regime has fallen.” He noted that Congress ought to be discussing the costs and commitments that would follow an invasion: “We have heard precious little from the president, his team, as well as from this Congress…about these most difficult and critical questions.” He scoffed at war advocates who glibly spoke of Iraq as a “test case for democracy” in the Arab world. “How many of us,” he asked, “really know and understand much about Iraq, the country, the people, [its] role in the Arab world?” He added, “Imposing democracy through force in Iraq is a roll of the dice.” But Hagel still said he would vote for the measure.*25

  Senator Bob Graham, explaining his opposition to the resolution, quoted Winston Churchill: “Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy, but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.”

  The Senate voted 77 to 23 for the resolution. Twenty-nine of the fifty Democrats said aye. That included John Kerry, who was preparing to run for president in 2004, and Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader. Daschle was still dubious of Bush’s case for war, but that hadn’t stopped him from acquiescing to Bush’s demand. “We had just experienced 9/11,” Daschle subsequently said. “Bush was telling me that Iraq had WMD and we had to move.” Democrats who backed the resolution, he recalled, “were looking at where the country was. The country expected us to work together. We felt threatened.”

  It had taken the White House only one month to sell what Andy Card had described as its “new product”: a confrontation with Iraq. Bush had won the power to strike at—and even invade—Iraq. Whether he would actually launch war was still—at least in public circles—open to speculation. Tough negotiations were under way at the United Nations, where Powell, with the support of the Blair government, was pressing France and other members of the Security Council to pass a resolution that would essentially force Saddam to accept vigorous weapons inspections or face attack. Was Bush serious about accepting a UN solution, or was he going through the motions for PR purposes to help Blair, who was encountering widespread public opposition in England to a war with Iraq? Some Washington players, such as Powell and Biden, clung to the hope that war wasn’t yet a done deal. But Congress had just given Bush all the power he needed to make the decision on his own.

  TWO days after the Senate vote, a former U.S. ambassador published an oped piece in the San Jose Mercury News, a regional newspaper not closely followed in the nation’s capital. Joe Wilson argued that Bush was being too confrontational, wrapping his obvious smash-Saddam desires within a thin argument on WMDs, and that the United Nations was not taking a hard enough line on a dictator who had flouted many of its resolutions. He suggested that a well-designed and well-orchestrated confrontation, in which Saddam’s very existence wouldn’t be threatened, could compel Baghdad to give up any WMDs it might have. “An aggressive UN-sanctioned campaign to disarm Iraq—bolstered by a militarily supported inspection process—would combine the best of the U.S. and UN approaches, a robust disarmament policy with the international legitimacy the United States seeks,” he wrote.

&nb
sp; Wilson sent copies of his article to Brent Scowcroft, James Baker, and George H. W. Bush, all of whom he knew due to his stint as the last acting ambassador in Iraq before the previous war. Scowcroft forwarded the piece to Rice at the White House. “I did think they ought to talk to somebody who had experience with Saddam,” Scowcroft recalled later. “I made the point in a little note: ‘Here’s a person who has actually dealt with Saddam.’ ”

  Wilson received a note from former president Bush, who said that he “agreed with almost everything” in the piece. Baker responded positively as well. And producers from cable television shows started calling and asking the former ambassador to come on air to discuss his perspective on Iraq. Wilson had reason to be pleased. His ideas had resonated among the Bush I crowd; perhaps they were also being considered within the current Bush administration.

  But neither Scowcroft nor Wilson heard back from the White House.

  The idea was to create an incident.

  —JOHN MAGUIRE, DEPUTY CHIEF OF THE CIA IRAQ OPERATIONS GROUP

  9

  A Secret in the Nevada Desert

  WHO NEEDED evidence of weapons of mass destruction? John Maguire, the deputy chief of the CIA’s Iraq Operations Group, and the agency officers working the Anabasis project had their own plan for starting the war, and it had nothing to do with the WMD debate. They also had a small and secret army of Iraqi commandoes—led by a former Iraqi war hero—willing to put the plan into action.

  By the fall of 2002, the CIA’s Anabasis team had set up a clandestine training site in the Nevada desert. The existence of the camp was one of the most tightly held secrets in the government. When Senator Bob Graham, the intelligence committee chairman, was first briefed on the training plan, he immediately thought of another era—when the CIA, in the early 1960s, had trained Cuban exiles in southern Florida for the disastrous invasion of Cuba that became known as the Bay of Pigs. The camp was located at the Energy Department’s Nuclear Test Site, a vast isolated tract of land 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas and one of the most restricted stretches of territory in the country. Dozens of Iraqis had been brought to the site—some smuggled into the country—to train for a mission that Maguire and other CIA paramilitary officials hoped would trigger a war.

  The plan was a core element of the original Anabasis program. These were the CIA-backed commandoes who would seize control of an isolated Iraqi base at Nukhaib, near the Saudi border. Then they would go on the radio, announce a coup was under way, call on military units within Iraq to join them, and request that other nations support their bid to topple Saddam. Saddam, the thinking went, would be compelled to send troops to regain the base. But that would require him to violate the no-fly zone. The United States and Britain would then have a reason to attack Saddam’s forces, and the war would be on. The Bush administration, Maguire later said, “was too wedded” to the WMD argument for war. “The idea was to create an incident in which Saddam lashes out.” If all went as planned, “you’d have a premise for war: we’ve been invited in.”

  Maguire had been looking forward to such an operation since the day after 9/11. On September 12, 2001, he had called the man he wanted to lead this preinvasion invasion—Mohammed Abdullah al-Shahwani—and said, “It’s showtime.”

  It was a bittersweet reunion. Years earlier, Maguire had met and worked with Shahwani, a former Iraqi general and special forces commander, and both men carried battle scars. Shahwani had been a hero of the Iran-Iraq War. He had led a daring raid in 1984 on a mountaintop in northeastern Iraq that had been taken by Iranian forces. In one of the biggest military assaults in Iraqi military history, Shahwani and his troops—using 150 helicopters—retook the strategically significant position. Three months later, Shahwani, who had on one occasion overseen the transportation of tons of mustard gas for battlefield use, was booted out of Saddam’s army. The official reason: Iraq had too many high-ranking officers. But Shahwani assumed that Saddam considered a general capable of such derring-do a potential threat to his own rule.

  Five years later, Shawani fled Iraq, fearing that Saddam was about to arrest him. He set up an import-export business in Amman and began establishing a secret network of former and current military officers inside Iraq who were willing to plot a coup. When the CIA learned of Shawani’s network through Sarkis Soghanalian, a notorious arms dealer, it recruited him. Maguire became his control officer and reckoned the charismatic general a far more reliable partner than the conniving Chalabi.

  Maguire and his colleagues in the CIA’s operations directorate pressed the Clinton White House for permission to move ahead with Shahwani’s coup, lest Saddam get tipped to what was in the works. But White House officials—spooked by Chalabi’s botched 1995 insurrection and worried this network had been penetrated by Iraqi intelligence—withheld the go signal. By the spring of 1996, if not before, Saddam’s security forces had uncovered Shahwani’s operation, and the network was rolled up. About eighty of his operatives were executed, including three of Shahwani’s sons. Others were tortured. Maguire was enraged, believing that a lack of resolve in Washington had directly led to the deaths of his friend’s sons. Disgusted, Maguire considered resigning from the agency. A senior official talked him out of it, saying, “This will come around again.”

  And it did. In the Nevada desert six years later, Shahwani and Maguire were readying themselves for the next round—a chance, as Maguire would later say, “to make things right.” After Maguire had set up Anabasis, Shahwani had contacted members of his old network—Iraqi exiles scattered across the globe—and had told them to gather in Kurdish-controlled Iraq. In the summer of 2002, the CIA began moving small bands of these Iraqis into the United States. After September 11, it wasn’t easy for Arab men to enter the country. The CIA flew some of Shahwani’s recruits across the borders in secret flights with no public records kept. (The agency used planes involved in its “extraordinary rendition” program, under which it flew captured terrorist suspects to secret interrogation prisons around the world.) In other instances, the CIA was able to provide the Iraqi fighters with passports, allowing them to enter the United States on commercial flights.

  Come the fall, Shahwani and the agency had assembled about eighty members of this all-Iraqi squad of fighters at the secret camp in Nevada. They called themselves Scorpions 77 Alpha, named after a special forces unit Saddam had disbanded. (Another non-Iraqi Arab team of about fifteen saboteurs, mainly Egyptians and Lebanese, were also training at the site.)

  Most of the Iraqis had been professional soldiers, but they hadn’t done such work in years. Maguire and his CIA teams provided refresher courses in shooting weapons, blowing up buildings and power lines, jumping out of helicopters, conducting raids. At one point, two of the men were badly injured and nearly killed when their vehicle rolled over. The assembled Scorpions were mean, angry, and eager to fight. Shahwani was the commander of the unit. And they had their own rallying cry: “Back to Baghdad.”

  Other Iraqi opposition groups had no idea of the existence of the Scorpions. The Iraqi National Congress attempted to recruit Shahwani to join its ranks; he ignored the invitation. (The Scorpions scoffed at Chalabi for having no support or operatives within Iraq.) “Nobody knew about us,” one Scorpion later said. Inside the White House, officials responsible for Iraq planning were dimly aware of what was happening at the Nevada site. “We only knew that there were Iraqis who were being trained in small acts of sabotage and it was all being done by Tenet,” recalled one senior National Security Council aide. The training, as this official understood it, was for “dirty tricks” that would create “chaos behind enemy lines.” The Scorpions were indeed receiving training that could be put to such uses. But they were aiming to achieve more than dirty tricks; their goal was to trigger an invasion.*26

  WHILE building and training this covert force, the Anabasis men were achieving progress on another front: penetrating Saddam’s regime. One of Maguire’s deputies had established a relationship with the leader of Iraq’
s Sufi movement. The Sufis practiced a mystical brand of Islam, and their leader, a quirky holy man who believed in levitation, commanded a large and fiercely devoted following throughout Iraqi society. The leader, the CIA officers were told, could deliver sources at every level of the Iraqi leadership, including Iraqis who worked within Saddam’s security forces. All he had to do was to ask his followers to cooperate with the CIA, and they would. But the Sufi leader was not about to take such a risk—unless he had a good reason to do so.

  Back in September, when Congress was considering Bush’s Iraq resolution, Luis and Maguire had the religious mystic flown to Washington. They met with him one night at Marrakesh restaurant on New York Avenue, a popular Moroccan establishment ten blocks from the White House where belly dancers entertained the patrons, who sat on cushions on the floor. Over dinner, the religious mystic asked the same question that the Kurdish leaders had repeatedly put to the CIA men: “You’re not just going to come to Iraq, poke Saddam in the eye, and leave, are you?” No, Maguire assured him, this was for real. The United States was absolutely going to overthrow Saddam—and the CIA needed his help.

  The Sufi leader explained that he could be persuaded—by the right amount of cash. He asked for $1 million a month. If that were forthcoming, the religious man would direct his followers—some from within Saddam’s inner circle—to provide information to the Americans. The religious mystic didn’t like Saddam, and he wanted a role in shaping a postinvasion Iraq. But first and foremost, Maguire thought, he wanted the money. “It was a rental agreement,” the CIA man later said.