Hubris

by Michael Isikoff

  On January 27, the Berlin station replied that German intelligence “has not been able to verify [Curveball’s] reporting.” The station added a warning: “The source himself is problematical…. [T]o use information from another liaison service’s source whose information cannot be verified on such an important, key topic should take the most serious consideration.”

  After this disturbing cable came in, Tyler Drumheller, the European Division chief, told John McLaughlin’s executive assistant that the Germans were still blocking access to Curveball. And Drumheller followed up with an e-mail reporting that “we are not certain that we know where Curve Ball is” and that the Germans “cannot vouch for the validity of [Curveball’s] information.” Still, the Germans had told Drumheller that the Bush administration was free to use the Curveball information, as long as it did not attribute it to a German intelligence source; the Germans would not refute it.

  This was not much of an endorsement. McLaughlin checked with a WINPAC analyst who assured him Curveball’s reporting was solid.

  Yet on February 3, with Powell’s speech just two days away, McLaughlin’s executive assistant sent a memo to Drumheller asking him to “touch base” with CIA stations in Berlin and elsewhere to get a fix on the “current status/whereabouts” of Curveball. The memo noted that “we want to take every precaution against unwelcome surprises that might emerge concerning the intel case; clearly, public statements by this émigré, press accounts of his reporting or credibility, or even direct press access to him would cause a number of potential concerns.” McLaughlin wanted to be certain that after Powell displayed artist’s renderings of the mobile BW labs to the whole world, Curveball wouldn’t pop up in the media and say something to undermine the case. The CIA’s number two man was worrying more about a post-speech problem than the legitimacy of the allegation.

  But the only U.S. intelligence officer ever to have met Curveball was alarmed Powell would be depending on this iffy source. When Les, the Defense Department medical doctor and biological weapons specialist detailed to the CIA’s Counterproliferation Division, read a draft of Powell’s speech, he was upset. He had gone to Germany in 2000 to draw blood from Curveball and had returned troubled by the man he had met, suspecting he was a drunk and unreliable. Since then, Les had become frustrated as the Curveball operation continued. When he spotted Curveball information in Powell’s draft, he later told Senate investigators, “I thought, my gosh, we have got—I have got to go on record and make my concerns known.” On February 4, he sent an e-mail to the deputy chief of the CIA’s Joint Task Force on Iraq: “I do have a concern with the validity of the information based on ‘CURVE BALL.’ ” He noted there had been “major handling issues” with Curveball, including questions about whether “in fact, CURVE BALL was who he said he was.” And he wrote, “These issues, in my opinion, warrant further inquiry before we use the information as the backbone of one of our major findings of the existence of a continuing Iraqi BW program!” The doctor’s e-mail also reported that al-Harith—a supporting source for Curveball—had been branded a fabricator. “Need I say more?” he asked.

  The deputy chief invited Les to see him and talk about this. But the deputy chief told Les not to expect that anything would change. His e-mail response reflected the attitude of the CIA leadership—and of much of the intelligence community—toward the administration’s ongoing push for war: “As I said last night, let’s keep in mind the fact that this war’s going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn’t say, and that the Powers that Be probably aren’t terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he’s talking about. However, in the interest of Truth, we owe somebody a sentence of [sic] two of warning, if you honestly have reservations.”

  Les and the deputy chief met on the evening of February 4. Powell’s speech was too far along, the deputy chief said to the doctor. What was done was done. The one U.S. intelligence employee who had ever had direct contact with Curveball could not prevent this disaster from happening.

  Later that night, the Curveball issue came up yet again—this time with Tenet. The CIA director was already in New York City, helping with the final preparations for Powell’s speech the next day. From his hotel suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, he called Tyler Drumheller at home and asked for the phone number of Richard Dearlove, the chief of the British intelligence service. He wanted Dearlove’s approval to use British intelligence in the Powell speech. When Drumheller called Tenet back to give him the number, he mentioned Curveball. “Hey, boss, there’s problems with that case,” Drumheller later recalled telling Tenet. He quickly gave the CIA chief a boiled-down version of the Curveball issue. But Tenet, at this point, was in no mood to listen. He replied, according to Drumheller, with words to the effect, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m exhausted,” and said, “Don’t worry about it.” (Tenet would later claim he had no recollection of Drumheller’s warning about Curveball and had never heard any complaints about the Iraqi source until after the war began.)

  That wasn’t the only last-minute distraction for Tenet. About 2:30 A.M., Phil Mudd, the CIA’s top expert on terrorism, contacted him and passed along concerns from the White House. There were too many deletions to the passages on terrorism. Libby had called Powell’s staff in New York and asked why certain material had been cut from that part of the speech. Tenet tried to reach Wilkerson through the State Department switchboard, but he couldn’t get through.

  SOMETIME in the days before the UN speech, Senator Joe Biden called Powell. He told the secretary of state that he thought it was encouraging that Bush was sending Powell to the United Nations and not blowing off diplomacy. Perhaps there still was a chance to get a second UN resolution authorizing military action—which might compel Saddam to capitulate or at least legitimize an invasion. Referring to Powell’s UN presentation, Biden cautioned him, “Don’t speak to anything you don’t know about.” That is, don’t overstate the evidence. There was silence on the other end. Then Powell replied, “Someday when we’re both out of office, we’ll have a cup of coffee and I’ll tell you why.” Why what? Powell didn’t explain, but Biden took the remark to mean that Powell was going to present a case about which he had his doubts.

  THE day of the speech, Wilkerson got to the United Nations early. He wanted to be certain that everything would go as planned: the audiovisuals, the tapes of intercepted Iraqi communications that Powell would play. At one point, Wilkerson was told he had a call. It was the vice president’s office. “Give that one to Barry,” Wilkerson said, referring to Barry Lowenkron, a State Department official who had worked on the speech. But Lowenkron didn’t take the call either. Wilkerson was later told the caller was Scooter Libby. The vice president’s chief of staff had been making one last attempt to get the Atta-in-Prague allegation and other deleted sections of his terrorism draft back into Powell’s speech.

  Powell began at 10:30 that morning. Sitting right behind him at the United Nations was George Tenet. Powell had demanded that Tenet be there, a graphic demonstration that Powell was conveying evidence that had been vetted by the highest levels of U.S. intelligence. He told the members of the Security Council that he would “share with you what the United States knows about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction as well as Iraq’s involvement in terrorism.” Knows, he said. Not everything Washington knew could be disclosed, he said. Nevertheless, the evidence he had, Powell said, would demonstrate that “Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction.”

  Powell began with an intercepted conversation between two officers of Iraq’s Republican Guard that had occurred on November 26, 2002. The pair apparently had been discussing hiding a prohibited (though unspecified) vehicle. Another intercept had supposedly caught another Republican Guard officer telling a subordinate to “clean out” an ammunition storage site before weapons inspectors were to visit it. Here was proof, Powell declared, that Iraq was moving and hiding items—presumably related to WMDs, but he didn’t
say what they were.*34

  “We know,” Powell said, that Saddam’s son Qusay had ordered the removal of prohibited weapons from various palaces, that government officials were hiding WMD stuff in their homes, that key intelligence files were being driven around the Iraqi countryside to avoid detection. “We know,” he said, that warheads containing biological weapons had been disbursed to western Iraq.

  The presentation went on for seventy-six minutes. He showed satellite photos that he said depicted WMD materials being moved from Iraqi facilities. He maintained that Iraq had not accounted for all the WMD-related material it had possessed in the mid-1990s. As for what Iraq had at this moment in time, Powell reported that “one of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq’s biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents.” These labs of death, he said, in a matter of months “can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War.” The source for this, he disclosed, was an eyewitness hiding in another country. He meant Curveball. Powell put up a slide showing a drawing of these mobile labs—as trucks and as railway cars. “We know how they work,” he stated. “…We know that Iraq has at least seven of these mobile biological agent factories.” These labs in just one month could produce enough biological agent “to kill thousands upon thousands of people.” Iraq, he added, could use UAVs to launch a terrorist attack with biological weapons.

  Powell displayed a satellite photo of a facility where topsoil had been removed “in order to conceal chemical weapons evidence.” As for nuclear weapons, he maintained that Saddam had never abandoned his nuclear weapons program. He didn’t mention the Niger allegation, but he did cite the aluminum tubes. Powell, somewhat candidly, said there had been disagreement over the tubes but that “most U.S. experts” believed they were intended for centrifuges used to enrich uranium.

  The danger was not merely Saddam’s arsenal, Powell said, but the “sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist network.” To prove such a nexus existed, Powell claimed that Saddam was harboring Zarqawi’s network and called Zarqawi a bin Laden “associate.” Zarqawi, Powell reported, was running a camp specializing in poison and explosives training in northeastern Iraq. Had Zarqawi set up this base? What did it mean to be an al-Qaeda “associate”? It was all a bit fuzzy. And as if he were presenting a watered-down version of Feith’s slide show, Powell reported that representatives of al-Qaeda and Saddam’s regime had met “at least eight times” since the early 1990s.

  THEN Powell offered his most powerful example of the “sinister nexus.” It was the account of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the al-Qaeda commander who FBI agents feared had been tortured by the Egyptians. Powell, without using his name, stretched it out with dramatic effect:

  I can trace the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons [of mass destruction] to al-Qaeda. Fortunately, this operative is now detained, and he has told his story. I will relate it to you now as he himself described it.

  This terrorist operative, according to Powell, had recounted how bin Laden had been unable to develop chemical or biological agents at al-Qaeda labs in Afghanistan and had turned elsewhere for help. “Where did they go? Where did they look? They went to Iraq.” And Saddam’s regime had provided “help in acquiring poisons and gases.”

  But the CIA now had its doubts about this entire story. CIA analyst Paul Pillar, who specialized in terrorism issues, had become, as he later recalled, deeply troubled when he had read the al-Libi interrogation reports, which had been passed to the CIA by Egyptian intelligence. They were sketchy and ambiguous—“almost James Joycean,” Pillar subsequently said. It was hard to tell what al-Libi was really saying. One weekend, Pillar read them and reread them—and concluded that al-Libi was not actually claiming that the Iraqi training was real, only that it was something he had heard about from others. In January 2003, the CIA had produced a classified update on the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda that included a new caveat: al-Libi had not been in a position “to know if any training had taken place.”

  Powell was basing a key part of his argument for war on a source the CIA had, only days earlier, discounted.*35

  POWELL concluded with a few words about Saddam’s atrocious human rights record. Iraq, he noted, was in material breach of UN Security Council resolutions, including the latest one. “We must not shrink from whatever is ahead of us,” Powell said. It was almost as if he were trying to convince himself.

  As Powell spoke, Wilkerson watched closely from a few rows back. Powell seemed in command of the material. But Wilkerson was not happy. He stared at the Iraqi delegation. He wanted to see if the Iraqis were rattled. But from what Wilkerson could tell, the Iraqis seemed unfazed. It looked as if they were rolling their eyes, as if to say, “Is this the best you have?” Wilkerson concluded that the speech was also not cutting it with the broader audience. He slumped in his chair. “I thought I had failed,” he later said.

  The reviews in the media were far kinder than Wilkerson had expected. That night, on MSNBC, David Kay, the former UN weapons inspector, said that Powell’s presentation “was a well-integrated, very thorough case.” The next day, USA Today reported that Powell had “forcefully laid out newly declassified evidence of Iraq’s efforts to develop and conceal chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, as well as new signs that an al-Qaeda terrorist cell was set up in Baghdad last year.” The New York Times’ editorial page said that Powell had delivered a “convincing” presentation. Mary McGrory, the veteran liberal Washington Post columnist, declared, “He persuaded me, and I was as tough as France to convince.”*36

  Those aware of the disputes that had raged within the intelligence community were more in a position to be surprised by Powell’s speech. “I was stunned and appalled by the nuclear portion of Powell’s speech,” Wayne White, an Iraq analyst at INR, later recalled. “After all the work [INR analyst] Simon [Dodge] had done in order to convince so many in the department that there was nothing to the aluminum tube story, I could hardly believe that the secretary would, in effect, make assertions contradicting the conclusions of his own in-house intelligence shop.”

  When Drumheller listened to the speech, he was astonished that the Curveball information had been included. So was an officer within Valerie Wilson’s Joint Task Force on Iraq: “My mouth hung open when I saw Colin Powell use information from Curveball. It was like cognitive dissonance. Maybe, I thought, my government has something more. But it scared me deeply.”

  VIRTUALLY all of the allegations Powell presented would turn out to be wrong. But at the time, few in the media bothered poking at the details of Powell’s address. The presentation was largely covered as a success, even if it did not win over reluctant allies. Powell’s speech didn’t have the power of Adlai Stevenson’s showdown with the Soviets, but it achieved a boost in the poll numbers for the war-with-Iraq option. Powell had provided a measure of credibility to Bush’s argument for war.

  In later years, Powell would become increasingly embittered about the Security Council speech and the attention it continued to receive. “What I said was what they gave me to say,” he said in the summer of 2006. “I’m not an intelligence officer. I was secretary of state. Whatever was in that speech was what they [the CIA] told me. I kept asking them, ‘Are you sure of this? Are you confident of that?’ ” Powell said he had pressed hard on the mobile biolabs claim: “They said it was multi-sourced. I had no way of knowing it all went back to one guy.” Powell blamed Tenet for the fiasco at the UN. And when, as Powell put it, “the sources started dropping like flies,” he expressed his “disappointment” to the CIA director: “I had very little to do with the CIA after that.”

  It rankled Powell that his UN presentation had come to be considered a pivotal event on the path to war: “It’s annoying to me. Everybody focuses on my presentation…Well th
e same goddamn case was presented to the U.S. Senate and the Congress and they voted for [Bush’s Iraq] resolution…. Why aren’t they outraged? They’re the ones who are supposed to do oversight. The same case was presented to the president. Why isn’t the president outraged? Its always, ‘Gee, Powell, you made this speech to the UN.’ ”

  But at the time, Powell was satisfied with his performance. When he returned to Washington, he told Wilkerson he was giving an award, a special plaque, to everyone who had worked on the speech. Wilkerson, though, was deflated and told his boss he didn’t want it. (Another State Department official who received one of these plaques put it in his closet—and never took it out.) Wilkerson didn’t think the speech was nearly as powerful as it should have been. Nor did Wilkerson have much confidence in the evidence Powell had vouched for. Later, he called the speech “the lowest point in my professional life” and “a hoax.” He also said, “I never would have gone to war on that intelligence.” But that was indeed what was happening—and his boss had cleared the way.

  They had decided they were smarter than the rest of us.

  —MILITARY ANALYST WHO DRAFTED A STUDY PLANNING FOR POSTWAR IRAQ

  11

  Best-Laid Plans

  AS THE war drew closer, President Bush sought to recast and broaden its purpose. An invasion of Iraq wasn’t simply a preemptive strike against a menacing dictator; it would also be a transformative event for a troubled region. The president was now putting forth a grand and expansive vision, but one that obscured harsh realities that U.S. government experts were repeatedly warning about, both in public and behind the scenes.

  The president outlined his larger war goals in a speech at an American Enterprise Institute fund-raiser on February 26, 2003. Standing before fourteen hundred AEI supporters and allies in a ballroom at the Washington Hilton that evening, he declared that “the world has a clear interest in the spread of democratic values” and that a “new regime in Iraq would serve as a dramatic and inspiring example of freedom for other nations in the region.” After having spent months building a case for war primarily on the threat of weapons of mass destruction, Bush was fully embracing the idealistic, neo-Wilsonian rhetoric that Paul Wolfowitz and other neoconservative intellectuals had used to bolster their years-old case for war against Saddam. Their article of faith was that the overthrow of Saddam would be a catalyst for change in the Middle East—and Bush was accepting that far-reaching mission as his own. A liberal pro-Western democracy in Iraq, he said, would usher in a new era of political reform and “begin a new stage” for Middle East peace. The president acknowledged that “bringing stability and unity to a free Iraq will not be easy.” But he didn’t dwell on the difficulties. His AEI speech was part of the White House’s home-stretch effort to make the war sound easier and more noble—even as government experts and military officers were advising that the invasion and its aftermath would likely be costly and fraught with complexities.