Hubris

by Michael Isikoff

  Postwar Iraq planning paralleled what happened with prewar Iraq intelligence. The work of government experts and analysts was discarded by senior Bush administration policy makers when it conflicted with or undermined their own hardened ideas about what to expect in Iraq. They were confident—or wanted to believe—that the war would go smoothly. They didn’t need other views, notions, or plans—not from the State Department, the CIA, or the military. It was their war, and they would run it as they saw fit.

  IN LATE February, Bill Murray, the CIA station chief in Paris, hadn’t yet abandoned hope of reeling in Naji Sabri, the Iraqi foreign minister. The information that Sabri had passed to the CIA through the Lebanese journalist months earlier—that Saddam had no active WMD programs—had run counter to everything the White House was saying. It was at odds with what the CIA was reporting. Possibly it was just lies from the chief diplomat of a murderous regime. Still, Murray wanted to talk to Sabri face-to-face. But five months had gone by, and nothing had happened—and the war was approaching.

  The Lebanese journalist had told him that Sabri was still interested in cooperating with the CIA. But the logistics were difficult. Sabri couldn’t find an excuse to visit a country where a meeting could be set up. At this point Murray was furious with colleagues back at headquarters for doing little to help him. James Pavitt, the director of operations, had instructed officers from the Iraq Operations Group to work with Murray on this sensitive project. And there had been one idea: to arrange for the Jordanians to invite Sabri to Amman for a summit. Then Murray could hold a secret rendezvous with him there. But John Maguire and other officers in the Iraq Operations Group thought it was all a waste of time. They had no use for Murray’s source—not unless the Iraqi minister was willing to defect.

  Now Murray had another chance. Sabri would be flying to Kuala Lumpur for an Islamic conference. He would, the Lebanese journalist told Murray, talk to him there. The CIA man hopped a plane to Malaysia. When he landed, he learned that Sabri had already departed Kuala Lumpur for an Arab League meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh in the Sinai desert. Murray immediately flew to Cairo. He then looked for a connecting flight to the Sinai.

  Meanwhile, at the Arab League conference, on March 1, Sabri was mobbed—by journalists and by diplomats. War seemed imminent. And he was busy echoing Saddam’s line: “[W]e know that this American administration, with encouragement from Israel and the Israeli lobby in the U.S., is gearing up for war against Iraq.” But what did he want to tell the CIA? Baghdad’s official position was that it had no WMDs and no nuclear weapons programs. Was there anything Sabri could say to Murray that would indicate the Iraqis were telling the truth?

  Murray would never find out. Sabri once again eluded him. The big catch—recruiting the Iraqi foreign minister as a CIA source—didn’t happen. Murray was at the Cairo airport desperately trying to get a connecting flight to Sharm el-Sheikh when he learned Sabri had already flown back to Iraq.

  ON THE eve of war, the Niger charge disintegrated—completely.

  The day that Colin Powell delivered his presentation to the United Nations, Jacques Baute, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s chief for Iraqi nuclear matters, had picked up a sealed envelope at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. Six weeks earlier, the State Department had publicly accused the Iraqis of lying in their WMD declaration because they hadn’t acknowledged their efforts to obtain uranium from Niger. The Vienna-based IAEA, which was responsible for nuclear weapons inspections in Iraq, wanted to resolve the dispute. It asked Washington to share with it information that would back up Foggy Bottom’s assertion. It took a while to get a response. But then Baute was handed the envelope. Inside were the Niger documents. The material was considered sensitive; only Baute and IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei could look at it.

  At first glance, as he later recalled, Baute thought the documents were legitimate. (The package didn’t include the unbelievable memo chronicling a far-fetched scheme of Iraqis, Iranians, Sudanese, Libyans, and others to create an anti-Western rogue-state alliance.) But Baute was too busy to conduct a thorough review. Over the next ten days, he and ElBaradei hopped from one country to the next, including a stop in Baghdad. Meeting with Iraqi officials, Baute and ElBaradei asked whether Baghdad had sought yellowcake in Niger (without revealing they possessed secret records about the uranium deal). The Iraqis denied the accusation and, Baute later said, were “quite cooperative” in answering questions about the purported accord.

  Baute and his IAEA colleagues asked to speak to Wissam al-Zahawie, who had been Iraq’s ambassador to the Vatican. His name was on the sales agreement as an Iraqi official who had apparently brokered the deal. Zahawie had retired from the Iraq foreign service and was living in Amman, Jordan. The Iraqis were eager to have Zahawie talk to the IAEA officials and debunk this allegation. An official in the Iraqi Embassy in Amman called Zahawie and told him the Foreign Ministry wanted him in Baghdad immediately. He was back in the Iraqi capital the next day. The day after that, February 12, he was interviewed by Baute and other IAEA officials.

  Zahawie, as he later recounted, assumed that the subject at hand was his trip to Niger, for he had noticed Bush’s reference in the State of the Union speech to Iraq’s attempts to obtain uranium in Africa. First, the IAEA officials asked Zahawie about the details and purpose of his 1999 visit to Niger. Then they asked if he had signed a letter about a uranium purchase in 2000. Absolutely not, Zahawie told them.

  Baute, ElBaradei, and the IAEA officials were not satisfied that Zahawie was telling the truth. After all, they had what they assumed to be concrete evidence. Another interview was held the next day. Zahawie once again denied any involvement in a uranium deal and indignantly demanded the IAEA produce any documents it possessed suggesting otherwise. They must be forgeries, he insisted. Zahawie later recalled that he told the IAEA officials that he could sue them for libel “as I was being accused of something of which I was totally ignorant.”

  Baute didn’t show Zahawie the Niger papers. He was not ready to reveal all he knew—or thought he knew. He considered the documents his ace in the hole, and he wanted to research the matter before confronting the Iraqis with this powerful evidence. Despite the Iraqis’ denials, he was still hoping he could use the documents to push them to admitting that something had indeed happened in Niger. Until he took a closer look.

  On February 17, he was back in Vienna, and he finally had a moment to scrutinize the details of the deal outlined in the papers. He started plugging key words and phrases into Google. Within minutes, his basic research disclosed there was something wrong. The papers included a letter noting that the Nigerien president had approved the transaction under the authority of the 1965 Constitution of Niger. Yet Baute found a newspaper article that mentioned that the Constitution had been revived in 1999. Wouldn’t the Nigerien government have gotten the date of its own constitution right?

  Baute kept researching. He called the Niger Mission in Vienna to obtain information. And he changed his aim. He was no longer seeking to use the documents to corner Zahawie and the Iraqis; he was now trying to determine whether they were authentic. Within a couple of hours, he discovered about fifteen significant anomalies in the papers. The letterhead, the signatures, the dates, the format of the document—none of them matched up. One letter, dated October 10, 2000, was signed by Niger’s minister of foreign affairs, Allele Habibou—a man who hadn’t served in that office for more than ten years. It bore the heading “Conseil Militaire Suprême”—an organization that had gone out of existence in 1989. Another document dated July 30, 1999, referred in the past tense to deals that the other documents indicated had been arranged in June 2000.

  Baute worked into the evening and concluded that the papers were completely bogus. “I stared at my computer screen,” he recalled. “I was shocked.” Late in the night, he phoned ElBaradei at home and said there was a problem with the Niger charge. ElBaradei had an easy solution, according to Baute. The IAEA chief said, “We�
��ll report what we found. Good-night.” He hung up the phone.

  Baute shared his finding with his IAEA colleagues. They all agreed: the papers were fakes. Baute, using Google and public domain records, had been able to do quickly what the CIA had failed to do for a year: ascertain that the Niger papers were a hoax. Baute asked the Bush administration for any other information it might have on the alleged Niger deal. Nothing came. On March 3, the IAEA officially notified the U.S. Mission in Vienna that it had determined the papers were fraudulent. Four days later, in a public report to the Security Council, IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei stated that the documents were “not authentic.”*42

  The forged documents made headlines. The Washington Post put the story on its front page: “A key piece of evidence linking Iraq to a nuclear weapons program appears to have been fabricated, the United Nations’ chief nuclear inspector said yesterday in a report that called into question U.S. and British claims about Iraq’s secret nuclear ambitions.” Senator Jay Rockefeller called for an FBI investigation, to determine whether somebody had deliberately fed disinformation to the U.S. intelligence community. But as embarrassing as this was for the White House and the CIA, a full controversy didn’t erupt. The White House ably fended off questions about how Bush had come to make a claim in his State of the Union address that was apparently based on a crude fraud. “It was the information that we had,” Powell said. “We provided it [to the IAEA]. If that information is inaccurate, fine.” And Rice dismissed the importance of the discovery: “We have never rested our case on nuclear weapons programs in Iraq on this issue about some uranium from Niger.”

  U.S. intelligence agencies tried lamely to defend themselves. The DIA, which had produced the original yellowcake report that had caught Cheney’s eye, sent a new memo to Rumsfeld asserting that it had other information to support the Africa uranium charge. This included a U.S. Navy intelligence report that a West African businessman had arranged to store a large quantity of Niger uranium destined for Iraq in a warehouse in Benin. The memo failed to mention a pertinent detail: a U.S. Defense Department official had checked out the warehouse in question just a few weeks earlier and discovered that it was filled with bales of cotton. And the CIA’s WINPAC maintained it had other reports indicating that Baghdad had tried to obtain uranium but admitted this information was “fragmentary and unconfirmed.”†2

  The day after the IAEA declared the papers bogus, Joe Wilson appeared on CNN and blasted the Bush administration for mishandling the Niger papers. “We know a lot about the uranium business in Niger,” he said, “and for something like this to go unchallenged by the U.S. government is just simply stupid…. [I]t taints the whole rest of the case that the government is trying to build against Iraq…. The U.S. government should have or did know that this report was a fake.” The U.S. government did know? What was Wilson suggesting?

  Wilson had become a familiar figure on the cable news shows in recent months, a member of the foreign policy establishment who vocally opposed the war and the administration. He assumed that Iraq did possess some WMDs, but he argued that intrusive inspections were disrupting Saddam’s weapons. “This war is not about weapons of mass destruction,” Wilson had written in The Nation magazine. “…The underlying objective of this war is the imposition of a Pax Americana on the region and installation of vassal regimes that will control restive populations.”

  As Wilson pointed to the phony Niger documents as proof the Bush administration was hyping the case for war, he didn’t mention his own involvement in the story. A State Department spokesman had said of the documents, “We fell for it.” But in his remarks on CNN, Wilson hinted there was more to the tale.

  THE intelligence supporting the premise that Iraq was a threat had become weaker, not stronger, in the months since Bush had started pushing for war against Saddam. The two key elements in the nuclear weapons case—the Niger deal and the aluminum tubes—had not held up. The White House’s gripping metaphor, the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud, now looked empty. Questions about Curveball had not been answered. The CIA also had recently discovered that another Iraqi defector, a former chemist, whom it had relied upon for critical intelligence reporting on Iraq’s supposed chemical weapons was a faker.*43 In early March, the agency revised its view on another big issue: Iraq’s drones or unmanned aerial vehicles. The assertion that these vehicles could be used to attack the U.S. mainland with chemical or biological weapons had been based on intelligence reports that an Iraqi procurement agent had sought to buy U.S. mapping software for the weapons in the spring of 2001. But by early 2003, a CIA analyst had interviewed the procurement agent and concluded his purchase order for the mapping software had most likely been inadvertent; the Iraqi agent was really seeking other pieces of equipment from a manufacturer’s Web site. In a memo to the House intelligence committee, the CIA reported it now had “no definite indications that Baghdad [was] planning to use WMD-armed UAVs against the U.S. mainland.”

  None of this had an impact (on the Bush administration) as the war approached. The administration’s rhetoric stayed the same—or became more dramatic. Bush claimed an Iraqi UAV containing biological weapons “launched from a vessel off the American coast could reach hundreds of miles inland.” Rumsfeld declared, “We know that [Saddam] continues to hide biological or chemical weapons, moving them to different locations as often as every twelve to twenty-four hours.” Powell pointed to a new bin Laden audio-tape as evidence al-Qaeda was “in partnership with Iraq.” (In fact, bin Laden had only called upon Muslims to fight against an American invasion of Iraq.) At a public congressional hearing, Tenet claimed that Iraq had provided “training in poisons and gases” to al-Qaeda, once again invoking the questionable claims of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. At his last press conference before the war began, Bush charged that Saddam had “financed” al-Qaeda.

  ON MARCH 7, Britain introduced a U.S.-backed resolution in the Security Council that would essentially authorize war if Iraq failed to demonstrate its unconditional commitment to disarmament by March 17. France and Russia signaled they would veto the measure. Nevertheless, a date had been set.

  In the days before the invasion, the echo chamber of the war’s most vocal advocates resounded strongly. “We’ll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction,” Bill Kristol said on Nightline. He noted elsewhere that “very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president.” Asked by Chris Matthews if post-Saddam Iraq would be dominated by fundamentalist Shia, Richard Perle pointed to Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress as a force for pluralistic democracy in the new Iraq. He claimed there was little chance of civil war arising in Iraq, that the war would be “quick,” and that it would “not take anything like” Shinseki’s estimate of several hundred thousand troops “to maintain peace and order.” Appearing on a talk show on March 9, he said, “Forgive me. No one is talking about occupying Iraq for five to ten years.” New York Times columnist Bill Safire urged Bush to get on with the war: “Smoking guns and hiding terrorists will be found.”*44

  It wasn’t just the partisans, either. On March 6, The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward went on CNN’s Larry King Live and asserted that “the intelligence shows…there are massive amounts of weapons of mass destruction hidden, buried, unaccounted for” in Iraq.

  On the eve of war in Washington, journalists and others gathered at a cocktail party at the home of Philip Taubman, the Washington bureau chief of The New York Times, to celebrate his new book on high-tech espionage during the Eisenhower years. Judy Miller was one of several Times reporters there, and she seemed excited. Another journalist present asked if she was planning to head over to Iraq to cover the invasion. Miller, according to the other guest, could barely contain herself. “Are you kidding?” she replied. “I’ve been waiting for this war for ten years. I wouldn’t miss it for the world!”

  THE marketing campaign that had begun the previous September with a Cheney appearance
on Meet the Press ended with a Cheney appearance on Meet the Press. On March 16, while Bush was in the Azores to meet with the British and Spanish prime ministers, his future allies in the Iraq War, the vice president told Tim Russert that Saddam was hoarding unconventional weapons and had “a long-standing relationship” with al-Qaeda. Cheney dismissed the IAEA’s finding that Saddam had not revived its nuclear weapons program. “We believe,” Cheney said, “he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” (This was a misstatement, he later acknowledged. He meant to say that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.) He poohpoohed Shinseki’s estimate that several hundred thousand troops would be needed for an occupation. “We will be greeted as liberators,” the vice president said.

  The next evening, Bush delivered a nationally televised address. He hailed his administration’s “good-faith” efforts to disarm Iraq peacefully and declared that Saddam had thwarted the inspection process. “Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised,” Bush said. No doubt. Bush issued an ultimatum: Saddam and his two sons would have to leave Iraq within forty-eight hours, or there would be war.