Hubris

by Michael Isikoff

  Within days, the German group chief and Drumheller met with Pavitt, the head of the operations directorate, and Kappes and—once more—voiced their worries about Curveball. Pavitt, according to the German group chief, said this was a matter best left to the WINPAC analysts. The attempts to straighten out the Curveball operation had gone nowhere.

  “We were reading the reports about him and scratching our heads and saying, ‘What’s going on?’ ” an officer at the CIA’s Joint Task Force on Iraq later said. “We were following this with great interest. But thankfully, it was not our case. We knew he was a drunk. We knew this was beyond screwed up. But it had taken a life of its own, and it wouldn’t go away. We watched it like a train wreck—with detached fascination.”

  THE case against Iraq was also crumbling on another front: the aluminum tubes. The agency had arranged for a private contractor to “spin” the tubes to determine if they could rotate fast enough for a nuclear centrifuge. (The tubes had to be able to spin at 90,000 revolutions per minute to work in a gas centrifuge.) The test results came back and appeared to show that the tubes were too weak for this purpose. But WINPAC refused to accept the results and ordered the data reexamined—and then it declared the new data proof the tubes were indeed usable in a centrifuge. Energy Department specialists, though, disagreed. Perhaps more important, IAEA inspectors, now back in Iraq, had rushed to the country’s Nasser 81 mm rocket production facility and found 13,000 complete rockets—all made from the same aluminum tubes that the administration had been claiming were for nuclear centrifuges.

  With the tubes case weakening, Joe Turner, the relentless WINPAC analyst, flew off to Vienna. In a conference room overlooking the Danube River, he again confidently argued his case to IAEA officials that the tubes had to be for a nuclear weapons program. But by now, he had completely lost his audience. The meeting was a disaster. “Everybody was embarrassed when he came and made this presentation,” one participant later said. “Embarrassed and disgusted. We were going insane thinking, ‘Where is he coming from?’ ”

  On January 9, the IAEA released a report saying the tubes were “not directly suitable” for a nuclear centrifuge. The New York Times’ article on the report—which noted that Bush’s “key piece of evidence” had been challenged—was placed on page A10; the story was written by Michael Gordon, who had cowritten the original front-page Times story on the tubes.*28 Two and a half weeks later, on January 27, the IAEA reported to the UN Security Council that it had found no evidence of an active nuclear weapons program in Iraq. The aluminum tubes, the agency reported, appeared to be “consistent with the purpose stated by Iraq”—for artillery rockets.

  The vivid imagery of a few months earlier—the “smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud”—was looking more like a mirage.

  COME January, Shahwani and the Scorpions were all set. They had been trained. They knew the plan. The CIA moved them out of Nevada and flew them to Jordan. With comrades who hadn’t made it to the training site, the unit now had more than a hundred members. Maguire and his CIA colleagues had also established a separate clandestine group that would conduct sabotage inside Iraq once the Scorpions moved on their target: the isolated Iraqi air base. The goal of the saboteurs would be to create havoc—blow things up, set cars on fire—to make it seem as if the Iraqi Army had mutinied and civil disorder was spreading. The only thing the Scorpions needed was a green light from the White House. They were waiting.

  FOR months, Valerie Wilson and the several operations officers she supervised in the basement of CIA headquarters had been frantically chasing after sources in Iraq who could tell them anything about Saddam’s WMD programs. Wilson and her colleagues had developed only a small number of informants, mainly a few scientists working within Iraq. But all these sources had continued to say essentially the same thing: Iraq had no WMDs and no active WMD programs. The previous September, for example, the CIA had persuaded a Cleveland anesthesiologist to go to Baghdad and ask her brother, an electrical engineer whom the CIA believed was working on a covert nuclear weapons program, about Saddam’s effort to develop nuclear weapons. The brother had told his sister that no nuclear weapons program existed.

  The Joint Task Force on Iraq would write up reports detailing the denials they were getting from Iraqi scientists and shoot them into the CIA bureaucracy. But these reports were coming from only a few sources, perhaps not enough on which to base an unorthodox conclusion that would upset the White House. And CIA operations officers handling these Iraqi assets were never sure if they could believe their we-have-nothing pronouncements. “The working theory,” said one CIA officer involved with the JTFI, “was that we were dealing with a similar mentality we had seen in Soviet scientists. These people were living in a society where lying was a way of life, a way to survive. We didn’t just take their first answer when they said there was nothing or they themselves hadn’t been involved in WMDs.” Wilson and other JTFI officers couldn’t tell whether they were actually getting the correct answer or whether they weren’t doing their job well enough to find Saddam’s WMDs.

  “The fact that we were not getting affirmation of the WMDs did not mean they were not there,” this CIA officer recalled. Besides, Valerie Wilson and the others were merely ops officers. It was their job to mount operations, ascertain whether sources were blowing smoke or telling the truth, and bring in whatever data they could. The analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence—such as the WINPAC analysts—were supposed to figure out what it all meant.

  But on the Niger deal, Curveball, and the tubes, WINPAC analysts were making one profoundly wrong call after another—and consistently fending off challenges from other experts and even their own CIA colleagues. Their conclusions were exactly the material the White House wanted—and would soon use in the two final (and disastrous) acts of its sales campaign: the president’s State of the Union speech and a historic presentation by the secretary of state at the United Nations.

  I’m not reading this. This is crazy.

  —SECRETARY OF STATE COLIN POWELL

  10

  The Final Pitch

  IT WAS time to punch up another big speech on Iraq.

  In mid-January 2003, two White House speechwriters, Michael Gerson and Matthew Scully, were huddled over their colleague John Gibson’s shoulder staring at his computer in Room 191 of the Old Executive Office Building. The group had been working for weeks on the president’s upcoming State of the Union speech, and they were focused once again on making the strongest indictment they could against Saddam Hussein. A familiar issue was back: the purported yellowcake deal in Niger. The charge had been stripped from the UN speech in September and cut from the Cincinnati speech in October. But the speechwriters had been handed a top secret binder of material that included the National Intelligence Estimate—and the Niger charge was still there. They talked about it briefly among themselves. If this was true, it was a big deal. The Niger allegation made the nuclear case much more powerful. The speechwriters agreed to put it into the speech. If there was a problem, they figured, Bob Joseph, the hawkish National Security Council staffer who handled nuclear matters, or somebody else in the intelligence community, would tell them to take it out.

  In composing a litany of Saddam’s offenses, the speechwriters had become enamored of a rhetorical device—which was to have Bush pronounce declarative, definitive statements. We know Saddam has chemical weapons agents. We know Saddam has biological agents. And they turned the Niger allegation into one such line: “We also know that [Saddam] has recently sought to buy uranium in Africa.” Seeking CIA approval for this language, Joseph sent this part of the speech to his usual contact for such matters: the CIA’s WINPAC, the analytical unit that had aggressively advocated the Niger claim and the aluminum tubes case.

  When he got that portion, Alan Foley, the head of WINPAC, didn’t express any concern about the credibility of the Africa line—still holding to an inexplicable position. The CIA had by this point warned the White House four
times not to use the Niger allegation. Tenet had expressed skepticism about it to Hadley. And McLaughlin had told the Senate intelligence committee back in October that the CIA had looked at the yellowcake reports and “we don’t think they are very credible.” Yet WINPAC remained wedded to a flimsy claim that bolstered its nuclear case, and in Foley, Joseph had found a senior CIA official who wouldn’t object. That was all Joseph needed to give the speechwriters the clearance they wanted.

  Foley was a former Soviet analyst who, according to other intelligence officials, was not especially engaged in Iraq weapons issues. But he did raise a procedural matter. He was concerned that the line as written could be construed as revealing classified information that had come from a foreign intelligence service: the Italian SISMI. So Foley and Joseph worked out an agreement: the speech would refer to the British white paper, which had been publicly released in September and also included this charge. It was perhaps a distinction with little difference. But for Foley and Joseph, this formulation would protect the Italian secret, even if it was no longer much of one. And if anyone did have any concerns about the truth of the charge itself, attributing it to a British report would give them cover: We’re not saying it’s true; the British are.

  Tenet and McLaughlin, according to a senior CIA official, weren’t aware of Foley’s discussion with Joseph.*29 What was on their minds was a small piece of the speech that had nothing to do with Iraq. The White House was planning to have Bush in this speech announce the creation of a Terrorist Threat Integration Center that would compel the CIA, the FBI, the Pentagon, and the new Department of Homeland Security to share and analyze threat information in a single location. The proposal was creating the predictable bureaucratic tussles and headaches. For Tenet and McLaughlin, this was the critical part of the address, not the material that would be used to shore up the case for war.

  Meanwhile, Karen Hughes, Bush’s former communications director, who was now a White House consultant, was pressing Gerson and the other speechwriters to make the Iraq section of the speech as concrete as possible and to tie key charges to specific sources. Reading over a draft, she pointed out various charges and asked, “How do we know this?” She suggested the speechwriters erase the “we knows” and insert real sources: “the United Nations concluded”; “the International Atomic Energy Agency found”; “Iraqi defectors say.” It would make the speech more persuasive, she suggested. So who had said that Saddam had been looking for uranium in Africa? The British had. The speechwriters could back up the charge by referencing the British white paper. Karen Hughes’s attempt to firm up the speech led to the same formulation that Foley and Joseph had worked out independently.

  Gibson was aware that the Niger charge had twice been knocked out of previous speeches, but he didn’t dwell on that awkward detail. His assumption, he later recalled, was “maybe we had gotten better information on it.” Perhaps something new had come in. Neither chief speechwriter Michael Gerson nor Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley—both of whom had been told by the CIA three months earlier to dump the Niger accusation—raised any objections to including the Niger claim in the State of the Union speech either.

  On January 27, Tenet was at a National Security Council meeting and the White House handed him a copy of a near-final version of the speech, which was now loaded with references to assorted intelligence material and which included one sentence on the uranium-shopping-in-Africa claim. He put it into his briefcase and took it back to Langley. He handed it to an assistant and ordered that the draft be passed on to the director of the intelligence directorate. Tenet never read it.

  The one line had become part of the speech due to a series of screw-ups and all-too-convenient memory lapses. But it was no simple accident. At the CIA, the NSC, and the White House speechwriting shop, officials were eager to go as far as they could to depict Saddam as a danger. Nobody insisted on rigorous fact checking, which might end up diluting the power of the president’s message. Bush’s State of the Union speech would contain other assertions about Iraq that would be wrong or overstated, yet it would be his sixteen words about uranium and Africa that would cause the greatest havoc for the administration and come to represent the White House’s inflation of the WMD threat.

  ON THE evening of January 28, 2003, George W. Bush strode into the U.S. Capitol. He walked past senators, representatives, Supreme Court justices, foreign ambassadors, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and took his place in the well. Vice President Dick Cheney and House Speaker Denny Hastert sat behind him. Visitors to the Capitol this night had received instructions on how to escape a bioterrorism attack and had been informed that they could locate protective gear (called “escape hoods”) in wooden cabinets in the hallways. One seat in Laura Bush’s viewing box in the balcony was kept empty—a reminder of those killed in the September 11 attacks. There was much anticipation about what Bush would say about Iraq. Would he signal his intentions? In recent weeks, he had ratcheted up the rhetoric on Iraq in off-the-cuff remarks. But this was his chance to issue a full explanation of what he was thinking.

  Bush devoted the first half of his speech to domestic matters. This was by design. The speechwriters wanted to build suspense. They knew what everybody wanted to hear most was what the president had to say about Iraq. But he first talked about tax cuts, Medicare, and hydrogen-powered cars. When Bush, about halfway through the speech, turned to foreign policy matters, he started with Afghanistan and AIDS in Africa. “We have the terrorists on the run,” he declared. He didn’t mention Osama bin Laden.

  Then, after quickly referring to Iran and North Korea, Bush got to Iraq. The moment had come. The president claimed that Saddam was flouting the new UN inspections.*30 He once again depicted Saddam as a WMD menace, who was sitting on potentially huge stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. He claimed Iraq had mobile biological weapons labs—information he said the United States knew “from three Iraqi defectors.” He pointed to the aluminum tubes (even though they had recently been dismissed as evidence of a nuclear weapons program by the IAEA). And to bolster his claim that Saddam was trying to build nuclear weapons, Bush said, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”

  Bush claimed that Saddam was aiding al-Qaeda and warned that the Iraqi tyrant could slip WMDs to his terrorist allies. He invoked the specter of September 11: “Imagine those nineteen hijackers with other weapons and other plans—this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known.” The danger was growing, he insisted. The Iraqi people, he added, deserved liberation. “If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm,” Bush vowed, “for the safety of our people and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.”

  Bush’s remarks pointed to war. But his speech contained no new evidence—other than his reference to uranium seeking in Africa, the first time the president himself had used the charge. Otherwise, the speech was a reformulation of what his administration had already declared and a rehash of critical intelligence findings that had been disputed—with no acknowledgment of the existence of the disputes. “Americans are still being asked to take it on faith that the government knows what it has yet to show—that Iraq is hiding weapons of mass destruction and has ties to al-Qaida,” the Associated Press reported after the speech. “The allegations were thicker than the evidence in President Bush’s State of the Union speech.”*31

  In the speech, Bush had announced that he was asking the UN Security Council to hold a meeting in a week, at which Colin Powell would offer “information and intelligence” about Iraq’s weapons and links to terrorist groups. Bush was leaving the heavy lifting to the member of his Cabinet who was perhaps the most reluctant to guide the nation to war. It would be up to Powell to carry the argument for war over the finish line.

  The next day, as Air Force One flew Bush and his entourage to Gr
and Rapids, Michigan, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters that Powell would go before the UN Security Council to “connect the dots.” Would Powell, the reporters asked, be unveiling any fresh intelligence? “There’s a review under way,” Fleischer said. He added, “We are now entering the final phase.”

  JOE WILSON was puzzled. Watching the president give his speech, the retired ambassador had been struck by Bush’s brief reference to Iraq’s attempt to obtain uranium from Africa. The next day, he called a friend in the State Department. If Bush had been referring to Niger, Wilson told the State official, he may have misspoken. It wasn’t only that Wilson (or so he believed) had shot down the Niger allegation. The U.S. ambassador there and a four-star Marine Corps general had also reported to Washington that such a deal was unlikely, he told his friend. Had other information come in since? If not, Wilson suggested, then the record ought to be corrected. Perhaps, the State Department official suggested, Bush had been talking about a different African country. “I had no reason to doubt my informant—his access and knowledge were more current than mine—so I didn’t pursue the matter,” Wilson later wrote. “It was my business only if the president was referring to Niger.”

  IN LATE January, days before the State of the Union speech, Bush had asked Powell to present the case against Iraq to the United Nations, and Powell had saluted and said yes. The idea—not a subtle one—was to attach Powell’s credibility to the case for war. Powell’s positive rating in opinion polls was over 70 percent, far higher than anybody else’s in the administration. “You can afford to lose some poll points,” Cheney told Powell, according to Powell’s chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson. There was, Wilkerson thought, a real “coldness” between Powell and Cheney.*32