The CIA agreed to pay him, and eventually the amount did reach what the Sufi leader had requested. But Luis and Maguire considered it money well spent. Not long after the Marrakesh dinner, the religious mystic started to make Iraqi sources available to CIA officers based in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq. The sources—who were almost too good to be believed—included Iraqi military officials who were more loyal to the mystic than to the dictator. These sources were given the code name ROCKSTARS. The information the Sufi followers supplied would be the best material the CIA would get on Iraq, including real-time information on Saddam’s own movements.
THE results of the November 5 congressional elections further encouraged the Anabasis team—and anyone else hoping for war. The Republicans enlarged their margin in the House and regained control of the Senate. “It was pretty much everything George W. Bush wanted,” CNN political correspondent Candy Crowley told viewers after the results were in. As it turned out, Iraq hadn’t been as central an issue in the campaign as Karl Rove might once have desired. Many leading Democrats had voted for the president’s war resolution. Still, Rove, who had directed much of the campaign from the White House (with the help of his chief political deputy, Ken Mehlman), had played the party’s national security trump card as fiercely as he could. Bush and GOP candidates had hammered Democratic senators for failing to support the administration’s version of a bill to create the Department of Homeland Security. In Georgia, a Republican challenger, Saxby Chambliss, had aired attack ads against incumbent Senator Max Cleland, that flashed pictures of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden and accused the Democrat—a veteran who had lost three of his limbs while serving in Vietnam—of voting “against the president’s homeland security efforts.” Cleland lost. The White House and the Republican Party were keeping the lines between fighting terrorism and the threat of Saddam Hussein as blurry as possible.
Three days after the elections, the White House triumphed again. The UN Security Council, at the urging of the Americans and the British, voted 15 to 0 to find Iraq in “material breach” of previous resolutions regarding its weapons of mass destruction. A new resolution, 1441, gave Baghdad “a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations.” Saddam was required to cooperate fully with “enhanced” inspections. If he did not, Iraq would face “serious consequences”—a term that the Security Council had purposefully left undefined but that hawks in the Bush administration chose to read as military action. At the State Department, there was hope that diplomacy and perhaps last-minute Iraqi compliance might avert an invasion. Right after the UN vote, Senator Joe Biden got a call from Secretary of State Powell. “We have a chance of avoiding war,” Powell told him. “How bad can that be?”
Bush, though, did not greet the UN resolution with the words of a leader looking to avoid war. Moments after Resolution 1441 was passed, he declared that “any act of delay or defiance” on Saddam’s part would justify military action. And even as the new UN inspection process began, the administration quietly moved ahead with its war plans. On November 26, the day before the new team of UN weapons inspectors led by Hans Blix entered Iraq, General Tommy Franks, the head of Central Command, sent Rumsfeld a request to begin deploying 300,000 troops to the Gulf. It was “the mother of all deployment orders,” as Franks called it. Rumsfeld decided to stagger the order in two-week intervals, the better to avoid generating too much attention to a massive troop movement that might seem to be fore-closing the president’s diplomatic options. By early December, U.S. aircraft carriers were streaming to the Gulf, and Franks moved into a newly created operational headquarters in Doha, Qatar, to manage the invasion that was on schedule to start in the next few months.
THAT fall, Cheney called together several of his favorite in-house intellectuals to discuss the upcoming conflict. Cheney occasionally held cozy get-togethers at the vice presidential residence on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory in northwest Washington. The guests were invariably conservative scholars and commentators who shared the vice president’s distrust of diplomatic options. On this occasion, the guest list included Scooter Libby; Bernard Lewis, an Arabic scholar from Princeton; columnist George Will; and Victor Davis Hanson, a California raisin farmer and classical scholar, whose prolific writings about the virtues of American military power were read closely in the vice president’s office. Cheney had even bought copies of one of Hanson’s books for members of his staff, and he had assigned one of his aides to consult with Hanson regularly. Hanson was, as New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd acerbically dubbed him, Cheney’s “war guru.” Less than two weeks after 9/11, Hanson, writing in The Wall Street Journal, had argued that “battlefield stalwarts are rarely consensus builders” and that “great leaders are not only unpredictable, but often a little frightening.” He had added, “We need generals who this time may well resign if told not to go to Baghdad.”
On this evening, with the Iraq War on the horizon, Cheney wanted to discuss one of Hanson’s books in particular: The Soul of Battle. The book profiled three fearsome military leaders: George Patton in World War II, William Tecumseh Sherman in the Civil War, and Epaminondas, a Theban general who had destroyed the Spartan army in ancient Greece. All three, in Hanson’s study, were misunderstood figures. Each had been maligned during their day for employing ruthless tactics. But Hanson contended that their willingness to crush completely the armies of their enemies and (in Patton’s and Sherman’s cases) instill fear among the indigenous population had been effective. Cheney had read the book closely. “I think he was interested in the idea of people who are criticized as warmongers,” Hanson later said. He wanted to explore the “reaction that society has toward people who want to create freedom and a better life…[but] have to do it in such a way that shocks people sometimes.”
Cheney, it was clear to Hanson, viewed himself as one of those leaders. In the discussion that night, Cheney and Hanson talked about the historical parallels between the wars each of the three generals had fought and the modern-day struggle against Islamic fundamentalism and rogue dictators such as Saddam. Cheney was especially interested in the “bum rap” that Patton, Sherman, and Epaminondas had gotten in their respective day—and how each would later be vindicated by history, Hanson said. He warned the vice president and Libby that they, too, would face such scorn. “I just said, ‘I hope you people know that once you go into Iraq, you’re going to experience a level of invective that you won’t believe…like nothing you’ve ever witnessed,’ ” Hanson subsequently remarked.
Cheney was not worried about that, according to Hanson. In fact, the vice president seemed impervious to such concerns. He was interested in the idea that defying this sort of criticism was “the responsibility of a statesman.” Cheney, he added, was taking the “long view.”
THE target was cars—those of Iraqi officials in Amman, Jordan. John Maguire wanted to destroy the fleet of vehicles used by Saddam’s representatives in Jordan, as part of the secret Anabasis project.
As Maguire and Luis, the chief of the Iraq Operations Group, were speeding ahead with the various components of Anabasis—training operatives to conduct sabotage in Iraq, trying to penetrate Saddam’s inner circle, preparing for “direct action”—they were doing whatever they could to mess with Saddam. And they were meeting resistance—from within the CIA. What to do about Saddam’s cars in Jordan was one scuffle, but it was representative of the deeper conflict between the covert action squad and agency veterans, including station chiefs, who dismissed Anabasis as misguided adventurism.
Maguire, an expert in sabotage, saw the Iraqi auto fleet as an easy target. Amman had one of the largest concentrations of Iraqi government officials outside Iraq. There were two hundred or so vehicles used by Saddam’s diplomats and security officers stationed there. Maguire considered three sabotage options: simple, subtle, and direct. Simple was slashing tires and drilling small holes in the windshields—small-time vandalism. Direct sabotage was more severe: blowing up or burning the cars.
But that could track back to the CIA. He decided that in this case the subtle approach would be best. He devised a plan for the Amman CIA station to pour contaminants into the gas tanks of the Iraqis’ cars. Within a week or so the motors would be corroded; all the vehicles would grind to a halt.
But the Amman station chief refused to move. In a cable to CIA headquarters, he huffed that he wouldn’t engage in “juvenile college pranks.” Maguire hit the roof. This is exactly what’s wrong with the agency, he shouted. As he saw it, too many CIA stations were risk-averse timeservers who wouldn’t get off their backsides and implement his plan. “We have a directive from the president of the United States to do this,” Maguire shouted at the Amman station chief. “So shut the fuck up and do this! We’re not interested in your grousing as to whether this is a wise move or not. The president has made a decision!” But the cars project never happened.
Luis and Maguire were increasingly infuriated by the lack of cooperation from CIA stations around the globe. Their plan called for aggressive action—now. They wanted to disrupt Saddam’s finances and procurements, scare and intimidate his spy services, “ping” his regime with activities that might throw the dictator off his game. To block Saddam’s access to money, the Iraq Operations Group had identified money managers who had access to Saddam’s personal accounts. One idea was to target Saddam’s top moneyman in Geneva—set him up with prostitutes, get photographs, and blackmail him into shutting down the Iraqi dictator’s accounts. It was a classic maneuver, called a “honey trap” in the spy trade. But this scheme and other ideas weren’t happening—in large part, Luis and Maguire thought, because of lack of support from the field. These guys just don’t get it, Luis and Maguire would gripe about the station chiefs. They don’t understand we’re serious—and that this is their job.
In several cases, the field did come through. The Athens station arranged to sting Greek-based Iraqi security officials in an arms deal. The CIA officers in Greece made it look as if the Iraqis had been buying guns for terrorists. And the terrorist gun sting hit the local press—with no mention of the CIA’s role. For Luis and Maguire, it was a modest success.
But more often other parts of the Directorate of Operations were unresponsive. At one point, Luis and Maguire went to Pavitt, the chief of operations, and demanded he fire one of the station chiefs for insubordination. That would send the rest a message. Pavitt didn’t do it, but he did convene a conference in London of CIA station chiefs from Europe and the Middle East. At that secret meeting, held at the U.S. Embassy, Pavitt and other agency officials laid down the word: the overthrow of Saddam was coming; everyone was expected to get with the program. It was a powerful reinforcement of the message Luis and Maguire had been hammering at hard for nearly a year: “There is no turning back.”
THE Pentagon was preparing for an invasion. Anabasis paramilitary and intelligence operations were in motion. Yet critical elements of the WMD intelligence that propped up the administration’s case for war were unraveling.
By mid-October, the Niger documents delivered by Elisabetta Burba to the U.S. Embassy in Rome had been forwarded to State Department headquarters in Washington and were in the hands of one analyst, who immediately suspected they were bogus. As he reviewed the papers purporting to document a uranium deal, Simon Dodge, the nuclear analyst at the INR, zeroed in on the bizarre companion document that had come attached to the Niger papers. It described a secret meeting at the home of the Iraqi ambassador in Rome on the afternoon of June 14, 2002. At this gathering, military officials of the world’s leading outlaw states—Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, and Pakistan—had come together, according to the document, to form a secret alliance to defend themselves against the West. This “plan of action” for “Global Support” would include “Islamic patriots accused of belonging to criminal organizations.”
Iran and Iraq in a secret military pact? A worldwide alliance of rogue states and Islamic terrorists? This was something out of James Bond—or maybe Austin Powers. Dodge considered it “completely implausible,” as he later told Senate investigators. The document bore what Dodge later described in an e-mail as a “funky Emb. Of Niger stamp (to make it look official, I guess).” The same stamp was on the uranium agreement papers. That was, for Dodge, a telltale sign. If the outlandish rogue state memo had come from the same source as the yellowcake documents, what did that say about the credibility of the Niger allegation? He concluded that the entire set of papers from Rome was probably fraudulent and e-mailed that conclusion to his colleagues.*27
Dodge wasn’t alone. When INR analyst Wayne White (who had once served in Niger) saw the papers, he, too, questioned their authenticity—within about fifteen minutes. The uranium deal, he thought, seemed completely impractical. And Larry Wilkerson, Powell’s chief of staff, was visited at his office by an intelligence analyst who explained the implausibility of transporting massive quantities of uranium by trucks through the barely paved roads of Niger and across Africa to a port city—without any executives of the French consortium that controlled the uranium mines or any international inspectors noticing. By the time the two were done talking it through, Wilkerson later recalled, “we were laughing our asses off.”
The documents—obviously forged—should have ended all talk within the U.S. government about this Niger deal. Here was concrete evidence that the Niger charge—which had been included in the National Intelligence Estimate (even though top CIA officials had doubts about it)—was phony. But the CIA didn’t review the documents. The INR made a copy available to the CIA. Yet the agency did nothing with it. An officer at the agency’s Counterproliferation Division merely filed the papers in a vault.
With the suspicious documents sitting unexamined in a safe, the administration could make good use of the Niger charge—perhaps more so than before. On December 7, Iraq filed a 12,000-page cut-and-paste declaration with the United Nations—required under Resolution 1441—asserting that it possessed no unconventional weapons stockpiles or any nuclear program. (Hans Blix, the chief UN inspector, called the Iraqi statement “not enough to create confidence.”) The administration needed ammunition to show that the Iraqis were lying. On December 17, the CIA’s WINPAC, which had aggressively pushed the nuclear claims, sent a paper to the National Security Council challenging Baghdad’s assertion that it had no nuclear weapons program on two grounds: Saddam’s regime had failed to explain its procurement of the aluminum tubes and it had not acknowledged its “efforts to procure uranium from Niger.” (The next day, the State Department’s Bureau of Public Affairs posted a fact sheet on the department’s Web site pointing to these omissions. The fact sheet had been written in response to an order from Undersecretary of State John Bolton.) Tenet, McLaughlin, and other senior CIA officials had already dismissed the Niger allegation, yet WINPAC analysts—who were eager to show that Iraq was lying and determined to prove the nuclear case—couldn’t let go and were treating the charge as established fact. It was one more sign of severe dysfunction at the CIA. What explained this? “There’s no good answer,” Dodge later said.
But Dodge was getting annoyed. In an e-mail to an Energy Department analyst, he complained that the authors of the WINPAC paper had failed to point out to the NSC that the State Department had dissented on both the aluminum tubes and the Niger claims. The Energy analyst wrote back: “It is most disturbing that WINPAC is essentially directing foreign policy in this matter. There are some very strong points to be made in respect to Iraq’s arrogant non-compliance with UN sanctions. However when individuals attempt to convert those ‘strong statements’ into the ‘knock-out’ punch, the Administration will ultimately look foolish—i.e., the tubes and Niger!”
Dodge wouldn’t give up. On January 12, 2003, he fired off his strongest e-mail yet to intelligence community analysts. He called the Iran-Iraq rogue alliance document ridiculous and noted again that it had the same stamp as the other material. In his e-mail, Dodge used words that should have sent a shock wave through the intelligence sys
tem. “The uranium purchase agreement,” he wrote, “probably is a hoax,” and the unbelievable rogue state alliance document that had come attached to the uranium deal records was “clearly a forgery.”
Two Iraq analysts at WINPAC who finally looked at the Niger documents in mid-January 2003 noticed inconsistencies within the papers, but, as one later told congressional investigators, there was nothing “jumping out at us that the documents were forgeries.”
WHILE Dodge (at State) was trying to counter the WINPAC analysts (at CIA), there was within the agency a brewing battle over Curveball, the elusive Iraqi exile who was the main source for the claim that Iraq had mobile weapons labs. In the weeks after Tyler Drumheller, a CIA division chief, had warned the brass that Curveball might be unreliable, the agency took no steps to investigate this all-important source. But in mid-December, the executive assistant to CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin called a meeting to review Curveball’s credibility. In preparation for the meeting, the Directorate of Operations’ group chief in charge of German affairs sent out a cautionary e-mail to her colleagues. It raised the possibility that Curveball might have been “embellishing a bit” to get resettlement assistance from the German government. Now that he had received it, he appeared to be “less helpful”—and the Germans had their doubts about Curveball. “We have been unable to vet him operationally, and know very little about him,” the e-mail warned. (One recipient of the e-mail was Stephen Kappes, the number two official in the operations directorate.)
At the meeting on December 19, this CIA official expanded upon her suspicions, suggesting that Curveball’s stories about mobile labs may have been gleaned from public sources on the Internet. An analyst from WINPAC staunchly defended Curveball’s reporting, insisting that his information had been corroborated (by one of the INC defectors). McLaughlin’s executive assistant concluded that Curveball was “credible.” McLaughlin would later insist he had never been told about any of the doubts.
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