Hubris

by Michael Isikoff

  The presentation that Powell would deliver had been weeks in the making. After Iraq issued its WMD declaration in early December, the White House had asked the CIA to prepare a rebuttal. CIA analysts worked on this for several weeks. In late December, McLaughlin and Robert Walpole, the national intelligence officer who had overseen the National Intelligence Estimate, shared a draft with National Security Council staffers. The White House officials found it insufficient, complaining it lacked even the details of the NIE. Keep working on it, they told McLaughlin and Walpole. Weeks later, McLaughlin sent a revised version of the paper to the NSC and said, this is the best we can do.

  It still wasn’t good enough for the White House. Bush handed the assignment to Stephen Hadley and Scooter Libby. They were to take what the CIA had pulled together, whip it into shape, and produce a public case that would be irrefutable. The verdict—war—had essentially been reached; Bush was looking for the most compelling rationale to present to the public. The two lawyers went out to the CIA to search for whatever intelligence fragments they could find.

  On January 25, in the White House Situation Room, Libby presented what he had assembled to Rice, Hadley, Wolfowitz, Rove, Armitage, Gerson, and Hughes. Libby claimed that intercepts and human intelligence reports indicated that Iraq had been concealing, moving, and burying items. What were they? Libby didn’t know. But they had to be WMDs. He reported that Saddam’s ties to al-Qaeda were extensive. He pointed to Mohamed Atta’s alleged meeting in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence officer. All of this, Libby said, was a “Chinese menu” from which the various items could be selected. Armitage was stunned by Libby’s blatant attempt to transform uncertain fragments into solid evidence. Wolfowitz, though, was impressed. Rove, too. Hughes cautioned Libby to stick to the facts. As for who should be the front man for the administration, the group agreed: Powell.

  Powell was a good soldier who had earlier told Bush that he would stand by him in the coming war. He had tried hard to concoct a diplomatic resolution that Bush could accept. He and his top aides at State—Armitage and Undersecretary Marc Grossman—had believed that they had a chance of pulling an end run on Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and the go-for-war crowd. The Powell plan had been simple: keep the inspections process going for several more months, with increasingly intrusive inspections, and, at the same time, continue the military buildup and egg on the UN to threaten military action if Saddam did not capitulate. All of this might cause Saddam to step down, prompt an internal coup, or lead to other significant changes. But days earlier, on January 20, Powell and his allies at the State Department had practically given up. That day, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin had said that France would not even consider war against Iraq—as long as the French believed peaceful alternatives (such as inspections) remained. The Chinese and German foreign ministers echoed his remarks.

  The threat of a UN-sanctioned war was gone. De Villepin’s statement enraged Powell and his team. It seemed a betrayal, for Powell was attempting to walk a tightrope, pushing the United Nations to pressure Iraq further and hoping muscular diplomacy would somehow prevent the war that Bush had already decided upon. Powell might have been hoping for more than he could reasonably expect. Still, he saw de Villepin’s “no” as pulling the rug out from under him—whether or not there really had been a rug there. “All the hope of everybody went away,” recalled a senior State Department official. “I was furious…. On that day, we were going to war.”

  THE day after Bush’s State of the Union speech, Powell entered the office of Larry Wilkerson, his chief of staff, and handed him a draft script for the UN speech that was forty-eight pages long. Scooter Libby had given it to Powell at the White House. “We’ve done some work,” Cheney had told Powell. “This is what you can work from.” Powell instructed Wilkerson to start with the Libby draft and gave Wilkerson specific orders: he was to coordinate with the White House and the CIA to guarantee the speech would be as solid as possible. Wilkerson had been a senior aide to Powell for ten of the past fourteen years, and Powell trusted him completely. He told Wilkerson that he would be working with Will Tobey from the National Security Council, John Hannah from Cheney’s office, Tenet, and McLaughlin. Powell wanted an airtight case, with multiple sources for every claim.

  Wilkerson understood that the speech was a historic moment—both for his boss and for the country. Commentators were already comparing Powell’s upcoming address to the dramatic moment during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, had displayed aerial photographs of Soviet missiles in Cuba at a special UN session and demanded an explanation from the Soviet ambassador. “I’m prepared to wait until hell freezes over,” Stevenson had said. (Powell and Wilkerson would soon study tapes of Stevenson’s talk.) Powell’s speech at the United Nations would be his chance to galvanize world attention—just as Stevenson had.

  The next morning, Wilkerson arrived at CIA headquarters to get to work. The team, including Tenet, McLaughlin, Tobey, Hannah, and Bob Joseph, assembled in Tenet’s conference room and started reviewing the Libby draft. The process quickly proved tedious and exasperating. Wilkerson insisted on seeing the source for every assertion in the Libby script—not just the citation but the actual report or document. Wilkerson forced Hannah to page through his clipboard and pull out the supporting material.

  For Wilkerson, this was the first peek under the hood of the administration’s WMD case—and it was not pretty. “Hannah was constantly flipping through his clipboard, trying to source and verify all the statements,” Wilkerson recalled. As the meeting wore on, Wilkerson became increasingly frustrated. “It was clear the thing was put together by cherry-picking everything from The New York Times to the DIA,” he said. When Wilkerson and the team began to examine the underlying sources, they found that a Defense Intelligence Agency report was not being used properly, a CIA report was not being cited in a fair way, a referenced New York Times article was quoting a DIA report out of context. There were stories cited from The Washington Times by Bill Gertz, the conservative paper’s defense writer, who specialized in receiving leaks from hard-liners inside the Pentagon. Much of the information in Libby’s draft, Wilkerson concluded, had come from the Iraqi National Congress—laundered through Feith’s operation at the Pentagon. It was maddening. Another State Department official present recalled that “we couldn’t figure out where” the WMD allegations in the Libby draft were “coming from…. We took it apart piece by piece.”

  After six hours of work, only a few pages had been vetted. “Finally,” Wilkerson recalled, “I threw the paper down on the table and said, ‘This isn’t going to cut it, ladies and gentlemen. We’re never going to get there. We’re going to have to have a different method.’ And that’s when George said, ‘Let’s use the NIE.’ ” Tenet turned to Hannah and rubbed it in: “I don’t understand why we weren’t doing that from the start. You’ve wasted a lot of our time.” The Libby draft was tossed—and the team had a fresh script, the National Intelligence Estimate.

  The new approach gave Wilkerson some comfort. In the days ahead, as Wilkerson and the others crafted the speech using assertions from the NIE, there was an illusion of professionalism. Tenet and McLaughlin would assure Wilkerson of the multiple sourcing for each claim—on mobile labs, aluminum tubes, UAVs. Wilkerson would press Tenet: You’ve got multiple sources for this and you’re saying, George, they’re independent of each other? “And then,” Wilkerson recalled, “John [McLaughlin] would jump in and say, ‘Yeah, this one was obtained this way, this one that way, they didn’t collude, they’re independent, and we’ve got satellite evidence to corroborate this man’s remarks.’ ” On at least one occasion, there was a heated discussion over the aluminum tubes. “Without the tubes there was no nuclear case,” a State Department official involved in this prep work recalled. Tenet and McLaughlin insisted on including the tubes; McLaughlin cited the spin tests that had been conducted, not disclosing that some experts had
read the results as failures.

  There was even talk of Powell holding up one of the tubes for dramatic effect. But a veteran communications strategist in the room balked. “If you do that, it will be on the front page of every paper the next day,” noted Anna Perez, Condoleezza Rice’s chief of communications. “Do you really want to do that?” Perez had a feel for these things; she had worked for Walt Disney, Chevron, and a top Hollywood talent agency. This would, she thought, be an awkward visual. Powell would be holding up the one piece of evidence that was most in dispute. Everybody would focus on that.

  The idea was scrapped. Instead, the group came up with an alternative visual. When Powell was to start talking about biological weapons, he would raise a small medical vial. It was big enough to contain “less than a teaspoon” of dry anthrax—the same amount, he would note, that had shut down the U.S. Senate during the 2001 anthrax attack, killed two postal workers, and forced several hundred people to obtain emergency medical treatment.

  As the back-and-forth continued, one of the State Department officials present started wondering, What about that Africa uranium charge? Bush had just highlighted it in the State of the Union. The State official kept waiting for Tenet or McLaughlin to mention it. “But nothing ever came up,” the official recalled. It was curious.

  On January 31, the State Department’s INR, which had been vetting the work-in-progress draft, sent Powell a memo noting that thirty-eight allegations in the speech were “weak” or “unsubstantiated.” The document noted that the draft’s claim that Saddam had plans to hide WMDs (possibly in another country) had come mostly from “questionable sources.” The draft asserted that the presence of decontamination vehicles at suspected sites was evidence that Iraq was stockpiling chemical weapons. But the INR analysis noted that these vehicles were “water trucks that can have legitimate uses.” The draft also cited suspicious activity at a suspected chemical weapons site. INR wrote, “We caution, however, that Iraq has given [the UN inspectors] what may be a plausible account for this activity—that this was an exercise involving the movement of conventional explosives.” The INR memo reported that the section on the aluminum tubes was “WEAK” and contained “egregious errors.” INR analysts also objected to a section that stated that terrorists “could come through Baghdad and pick-up biological weapons.”

  Twenty-eight of the thirty-eight items identified by INR were excised from the draft. Two days later, the INR would object to seven items, three of which would be deleted. Since not all of INR’s objections were heeded, Powell would be presenting evidence at the UN that even his own specialists did not believe.

  ON JANUARY 31, Bush met with Blair in the Oval Office for two hours. Blair had a request. He explained to Bush that he needed a second UN resolution that explicitly authorized military action against Iraq—despite France’s opposition. He had promised his Labour Party he would seek one, and, with the British public decidedly opposed to an invasion of Iraq, a second UN resolution—at least an attempt to obtain one—was a political necessity. A memo written by a Blair aide recorded what the prime minister told Bush: “If anything went wrong with the military campaign, or if Saddam increased the stakes by burning the oil wells, killing children or fomenting internal divisions within Iraq, a second resolution would give us international cover, especially with the Arabs.” Bush agreed to help his ally and to twist arms at the United Nations to win another vote there—even though Cheney never thought a second resolution was necessary and Powell now believed it wasn’t achievable. But Bush told Blair that regardless of what happened at the United Nations or with the inspections in Iraq, there already was a tentative start date for the war: March 10.

  Bush was clearly committed to an invasion. During the meeting, according to the memo, both Bush and Blair said they doubted that weapons of mass destruction would be discovered by the inspectors in Iraq in the near future. Given that, Bush raised the idea of provoking a confrontation with Saddam and floated several possibilities. “The U.S. was thinking,” the document reported, “of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach” of existing UN resolutions. And a retaliatory attack would be justified. Bush was considering creating an incident to start the war. Another option Bush cited, according to the memo, was producing “a defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam’s WMD.” Bush also mentioned assassinating Saddam. (If Bush wanted to stage a provocation, the CIA-trained Scorpions were ready to go in Jordan and the Anabasis men already had a plan to do it.)

  Bush and Blair also talked about the aluminum tubes. The president assured the prime minister the IAEA was wrong to conclude that the tubes were for artillery rockets, not for a nuclear program. Bush insisted that the specifications of the tubes indicated they were indeed right for a nuclear centrifuge. And when the two talked briefly about postinvasion Iraq, Bush remarked that it was “unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups.” Blair agreed.

  THE drafting of Powell’s presentation continued slowly, and tensions were growing. By Saturday morning, February 1, a proposed twenty-five-page script on Saddam’s purported connections to terrorists had arrived—a compilation of the material that had been prepared by Feith’s office. Cheney and Libby had been pushing to include a section on the supposed connections between Saddam and al-Qaeda. At this point, Powell himself was working on the speech in Tenet’s conference room—joined at times by Rice, Hadley, Libby, and others. After Powell reviewed the new terrorism section, he pulled Wilkerson off to a side room and said, “I’m not reading this. This is crazy.” The script, Wilkerson remembered, was a “genealogy” that strung together connections or associations and that were incomprehensible—and possibly meaningless: “It was like the Bible. It was the Old Testament. It was ‘Joe met Bob met Frank met Bill met Ted met Jane in Khartoum and therefore we assume that Bob knew Ralph.’ It was incredible.”

  The terror script was pared down to only the few assertions that the CIA would endorse, such as the claim that the Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab Zarqawi—who had been linked to a plot to assassinate a U.S. diplomat in Jordan—was being harbored in Iraq. (The evidence for the claims Powell accepted would prove sketchy as well.) Libby and Hadley, though, still wanted Powell to use a more dramatic allegation: the Atta-in-Prague story (Cheney had also asked Powell to use the charge). Powell had taken it out because Tenet had told him the agency was not sure the meeting ever occurred. But Hadley repeatedly tried to insert it in the speech. “What happened to Atta-in-Prague?” he asked during one discussion. Powell fixed him with a cold stare: “Steve, we took that out, don’t you remember? And it’s staying out.” Hadley, according to Wilkerson, “kind of shrunk in his chair, looked at the secretary, and said, ‘Oh yeah, I remember that.’ ”

  Hunkered down at CIA headquarters, Powell kept poring over the intelligence, fighting off frustration. So much of the material was murky. On Sunday, February 2, he asked Armitage to join him at Langley. Armitage, too, was wary of the information piled before them. Powell’s patience was wearing thin. “This is bullshit,” he said at one point, throwing his papers down on the table.

  Amid the fighting over what he should say in the speech, Powell received little support from another high-level official who had joined the group: Condoleezza Rice. Powell had been a mentor to Rice. They had worked together during the first Bush administration and were the two most visible African Americans in the government. But in the battles that weekend, Rice showed little deference to Powell, consistently siding with her deputy, Hadley, and the vice president’s staff. She seemed almost dismissive of Powell’s concerns and, as Wilkerson saw it, showed him little respect. “I was taken aback by the way Dr. Rice talked to him,” Wilkerson said. “She would just say, ‘Oh, come on, you know that ought to be in there.’ ”

  AT THE start of the following week, the team assembled in New York and continued working on Powell’s pr
esentation. But unbeknown to the secretary of state, the CIA was at war with itself over a critical piece of intelligence that he was about to share with the world.

  One of the most alarming passages in the draft of Powell’s speech was the claim that Iraq had mobile biological labs. Bush had cited these labs in his State of the Union speech, but the charge had not been played up and had received little media attention. The draft called for Powell to state that U.S. intelligence had “first hand descriptions” of these facilities and to show diagrams of the labs. With these illustrations, it would look as if the United States had caught Saddam red-handed. The plan was for Powell to back up this powerful allegation by citing four sources. The most important one would be an Iraqi chemical engineer: Curveball, the defector of questionable credibility. Another would be a former Iraqi major who had defected in 2001 and had supposedly confirmed the existence of the biolabs. This was Mohammad al-Harith, an INC-produced source who had been guided into the intelligence system by Jim Woolsey. Yet he had been judged a fabricator by the Defense Intelligence Agency a year earlier.*33

  But the mobile labs story was really all about Curveball. And within the CIA, some officers were still worrying about him. On January 24, the Germany group chief in the DO, who had previously raised concerns about Curveball, sent a cable to the Berlin station and asked if it could quickly obtain from the Germans the transcripts of Curveball’s interviews with German intelligence. She had learned that there would be a Powell speech at the United Nations that would refer to the mobile biological weapons. As she later told investigators, she “couldn’t believe” the presentation relied on Curveball reporting.