About this time, John Gibson, the speechwriter who had done his best to craft a compelling case against Saddam, ran into Sean McCormack, the press spokesman for the National Security Council. McCormack, according to Gibson, asked, “What if we invade Iraq and we don’t find any weapons?” “We both kind of laughed,” Gibson recalled. But he didn’t think it was that funny. He had written the words Bush had used to lead the country to war, even when he hadn’t been sure of the wisdom of this endeavor. No weapons? That would be a problem, he thought.
And on the night of March 18, White House press aide Adam Levine fielded a call from Tim Russert. “All I can tell you, man,” NBC’s Washington bureau chief said to him, “is you guys better find the WMD.” Levine replied, “You’re telling me.” Then the Bush aide said, “Either that, or we’ll find the CIA version of Mark Fuhrman.” It was Levine’s attempt at humor: he was referring to the notorious LA cop accused of planting evidence in the O. J. Simpson murder case.
The following evening, after the first bombing raid had occurred, Bush spoke to the nation from the Oval Office for a few minutes and announced that the war had started. “We will,” he declared, “accept no outcome but victory.”
WITHIN the CIA’s Joint Task Force on Iraq—where Valerie Wilson and her colleagues were still running operations out of the basement at CIA headquarters in search of evidence of Saddam’s WMDs—the start of the war brought a sense of frustration. “I felt like we ran out of time,” one CIA officer recalled. “The war came so suddenly. We didn’t have enough information to challenge the assumption that there were WMDs. It was very disappointing. How do you know it’s a dry well? That Saddam was constrained? Given more time, we could have worked through the issue. We were trying to think creatively. But the war came too fast, and we did not have the time to look everywhere we could. From 9/11 to the war—eighteen months—that was not enough time to get a good answer to this important question. It was just not enough time.”
FOR those who wanted to overthrow Saddam, everything had worked out. The American intervention, for which planning had begun sixteen months earlier, was about to unfold. But the public case had been built on a flimsy foundation: a faulty and misleading National Intelligence Estimate; the phony Niger charge; the false claims of fabricating defectors such as Curveball; the White House Iraq Group’s spin campaign; the misleading media reports seeded by the manipulative Iraqi National Congress; the disputed aluminum tubes; the CIA white paper that concealed intelligence agency dissents; Rice’s “mushroom cloud”; the imaginary Atta-in-Prague story that obsessed Cheney, Wolfowitz, Libby, and Feith; the flawed Powell presentation; and Bush’s overstated (if not overheated) rhetoric that exceeded the actual and exaggerated intelligence. This was all part of the “product”—as chief of staff Andrew Card had called it—that the White House had rolled out the previous September.
The war would not turn out as Bush administration officials had promised. Because of that, the debate over the Iraq War—had it really been necessary, had Bush hyped the threat, had the administration prepared adequately, had the American public been misled?—would continue long after the invasion. That bitter and fierce brawl would yield controversy and scandal that would burden and shape the rest of the Bush presidency.
Holy shit, we’re in trouble.
—CARL FORD, JR., STATE DEPARTMENT INTELLIGENCE CHIEF
12
The Missing Weapons
THE WAR went well—at first.
On the night of March 19, Bush ordered an air strike on a compound outside Baghdad in the hope of killing Saddam—and perhaps ending the war before it even started. Three ROCKSTARS sources—members of Saddam’s security detail recruited for the CIA by the well-compensated Sufi mystic—had placed the Iraqi dictator at the site. But either their intelligence reporting had been wrong and Saddam was not there or Saddam survived the attack, because several hours later the Iraqi tyrant was on television decrying the raid. On March 21, U.S.-led coalition forces mounted nine hours of “shock and awe” bombing and missile strikes. Then ground forces entered Iraq.
The CIA Scorpions—the unit of former Iraqi special forces headed by retired General Shahwani and trained at the secret camp in the Nevada desert—had not been given the green light to seize the Iraqi air base and start the war. General Tommy Franks, according to John Maguire, had nixed the operation; he didn’t want a sideshow interfering with his carefully designed invasion plans. The Scorpions would join the assault in a more traditional manner, helping to cut roads in the south and assisting U.S. commanders as they took cities and tried to establish ties with local mullahs.*45
In the next weeks, U.S. troops marched toward Baghdad. Embedded reporters enthusiastically chronicled the actions—even the mundane ones—of American military units. The coalition forces consistently defeated Saddam’s troops. But sandstorms did slow down the invasion, and the irregulars of the Fedayeen Saddam forces were more of a problem than military planners had expected. For a few days, critics expressed concern that the war plan wasn’t sufficient. But the complaining didn’t last long.
In some portions of Iraq, liberated Iraqis did celebrate. Iraq didn’t counterattack against Israel. No refugee crisis developed. Oil fields were protected. Coalition casualties were moderate. No WMDs were fired at coalition forces. And when the U.S.-led troops reached Baghdad, there was no final, bloody battle. The troops rolled in, and on April 9 a giant statue of Saddam was pulled down by a small but excited crowd. The next day, Ken Adelman, a neoconservative defense intellectual close to Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Post crowing that he had been right fourteen months earlier when he had predicted Iraq would be a “cakewalk.”
A few days later, Cheney held a small celebratory dinner party at the vice president’s residence with Adelman, Wolfowitz, and Libby. They congratulated themselves, cheered Bush, and derided Powell for never having been a true believer. Asked for his thoughts, Libby said, “Wonderful.” But, Adelman asked, what about the weapons of mass destruction? Where are they? “We’ll find them,” Wolfowitz said. Cheney repeated the words. This confidence on the part of the war’s architects would soon be challenged by reality. The search for the weapons wouldn’t meet the expectations they had set. And that would lead to yet more spinning and more distortion, including a new CIA white paper that would roil the intelligence community and become another black eye for the agency. At the same time, securing Iraq would turn out to be anything but a cakewalk.
AFTER the statue came down, trouble began. With the collapse of Saddam’s regime, Baghdad became a city of chaos. The decrepit water and electricity systems collapsed. Extensive looting occurred at government ministries, palaces, private homes, stores, hospitals, and the Iraqi National Museum. Media reports noted that the museum, a repository of treasures dating back to the cradle of civilization, had been ransacked and that up to 170,000 of its artifacts had been pilfered. It was a powerful symbol: coalition forces were guarding oil facilities but not the sites critical to the welfare and identity of the Iraqi people.*46 (American soldiers had been sent to destroy a disrespectful tile mosaic of the first President Bush on the floor of the al-Rashid Hotel; they weren’t dispatched to safeguard hospitals or cultural institutions.) “The widespread anarchy that followed the first moments of liberty here this week,” The New York Times reported, “has become a central problem for American soldiers and marines, who constitute the only visible presence of any form of order. The mayhem gave rise today to signs of widespread Iraqi anger over the direction of the American enterprise here.” Suicide bombers began targeting American troops. Outside Baghdad, nuclear facilities and ammunition storehouses were looted. It was looking as if the Bush administration hadn’t adequately prepared for what would come after the defeat of Saddam’s army.
The administration responses to the rapid deterioration of civil order weren’t reassuring. On April 11, Rumsfeld dismissed the reports of bedlam: “Stuff happens…. It is a fundamental misunderstanding
to see those images over and over and over again of some boy walking out with a vase and say, ‘Oh, my goodness, you didn’t have a plan.’ That’s nonsense. [The occupation forces] know what they’re doing. And they’re doing a terrific job. And it’s untidy. And freedom’s untidy.” Retired General Jay Garner, who as head of the Pentagon-created Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance was in charge of managing the postinvasion rebuilding in Iraq, criticized the media’s focus on the looting as “unfair.” There were, he said, “not near the problems we thought there would be.” Garner and his operation were based in Kuwait, waiting for a safe time to enter Iraq.
Others were not as sanguine. On April 12, Colonel Kevin Benson, who had been overseeing postwar planning for Central Command, briefed Major General William G. Webster, Jr., deputy commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq. Benson had prepared a “sequel” to his original postinvasion plan. The situation on the ground now appeared far more complicated and ominous. Benson’s new plan, called “Eclipse II,” outlined a “most likely scenario” for postwar Iraq that included “continued resistance” from Republican Guard units and other Baathist elements and a wave of sectarian violence (including “score settling” and “ethnic cleansing” among Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds). It also predicted that Islamic jihadists would stream into the country. Webster asked Benson how long he expected “the whole thing” to last. “Boss, I think it’s going to last three to five years,” Benson said.
THERE was another conspicuous problem: not only had no WMDs been deployed against U.S. troops, but no weapons were found—at all. In the initial days after the invasion, administration officials had exuded complete confidence that locating Saddam’s weapons cache would not be an issue. “We know where they are,” Rumsfeld had said on March 30 about Saddam’s chemical and biological stockpiles. “They’re in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat.” On April 10, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer asserted, “We have high confidence that they have weapons of mass destruction. This is what this war was about and is about. And we have high confidence it will be found.”
But by the second week in April, within the White House and throughout the administration, there was nervousness. It was, press aide Adam Levine subsequently recalled, a “roller coaster.” White House officials anxious for news related to unconventional weapons would become excited with each fresh report that something related to WMDs had been located in Iraq—only to learn the next day that it was nothing after all. One day, there was a report about the discovery of containers of ricin; the next day, they turned out to be barrels of curdled milk. “It seemed like every two or three days there would be some report that would turn out not to be true,” recalled Victoria Clarke, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs. Rove, in particular, was sensitive to the potential political danger; the failure to unearth WMDs, he feared, could undermine the president’s credibility and Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign was just beginning. Rove wasn’t alone. Michael Gerson, the chief speechwriter, returned from one senior staff meeting and told a colleague that some White House officials were insisting it didn’t matter whether any weapons were actually found—so long as the war was viewed as a success. They were wrong, Gerson said. It mattered for the president’s legacy.
Some intelligence officials also saw that the WMD issue could blow up. “As each day passed, it became more and more difficult to hold to the line that we’re going to find them,” recalled Carl Ford, Jr., the assistant secretary in charge of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR).
Ford had inside information. He was reading classified U.S. intelligence community reports based on the interrogations of captured senior Iraqi officials and scientists, including some who were on the so-called deck of cards of Iraqis most wanted by the U.S. military. All of those interrogated denied knowing about any weapons stockpiles. But as he read the reports, it didn’t seem to Ford that the Iraqis were parroting a cover story. “Each person had a slightly different take on it,” he recalled. “They were not saying the same thing.” Yet they all conveyed the same bottom line: they had no idea where any weapons were to be found. Then the U.S. military began polygraphing the Iraqis—and they all passed. The response among high-level administration officials, Ford said, was, “These guys really are good.” That is, good liars—who could beat the lie detector. Senior administration officials, according to Ford, were in “denial.” But Ford and some of his colleagues at State were starting to come around to a different view. “Our common reaction was,” Ford said, “ ‘Holy shit, we’re in trouble.’ ”
JUDY MILLER was hoping to prove otherwise. And she believed she had the scoop of the war—the key to resolving the mystery of the missing weapons.
The New York Times’ star was on the ground in Iraq, traveling as an embedded reporter with Mobile Exploitation Team (MET) Alpha, one of only two units looking for the weapons of mass destruction that Bush and his aides had claimed would be found in Iraq. Miller was the only journalist to get this coveted assignment, and that was no accident. Victoria Clarke, Rumsfeld’s chief spokesperson, had personally approved it. “She was fairly knowledgeable on the subject [of WMDs] and had written responsibly on it,” Clarke later said. “It wasn’t a hard call.”
In mid-April, Miller, wearing her military khakis, and the MET Alpha team were at a suspected weapons site in the desert. Off in the distance, an Iraqi man wearing a baseball cap was pointing out various spots in the sand to members of the unit. Miller couldn’t hear what the fellow was saying. She wasn’t permitted to speak to him. But she was confident she had something big.
At this time, Miller and the MET Alpha team were based in an abandoned chemical facility outside Karbala. The conditions were harsh. There was no electricity; the unit’s generator had broken. From inside this facility, she worked on the article with her editors in New York over a satellite phone. Outside it was cold and windy. And she had a tough decision to make: whether to sleep outside in the elements or on the floor of a laboratory, where she would be surrounded by various chemical substances. She chose the floor.
Her piece, which landed on the front page of The New York Times on April 21, reported that the Iraqi with the baseball cap had the answer to the most pressing mystery of the war: Where were the weapons of mass destruction? The Iraqi, she wrote, was a scientist who had worked on Iraq’s chemical weapons program for more than a decade. He had told his military interrogators that days before U.S. troops stormed into Iraq, Saddam had destroyed his stocks of chemical weapons and his biological warfare equipment. The scientist, according to Miller, also had disclosed to the WMD hunters that Iraq had been secretly sending WMD materials and equipment to Syria for years, that Baghdad had recently been cooperating with al-Qaeda on weapons-related matters, and that he himself had buried material from Iraq’s illicit arms program. Miller reported that this Iraqi had led MET Alpha to banned precursors for chemical weapons.
This one man’s story appeared to be confirmation of virtually everything the Bush administration had asserted before the war to justify an invasion of Iraq. Miller quoted Major General David Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, saying that this “may be the major discovery” of the war.
But Miller’s article contained obvious weaknesses. She noted that she had been permitted to watch the baseball-capped scientist leading MET Alpha members to various sites. But she hadn’t been allowed to talk to or even identify him, under the terms of her embedding agreement with the 75th Exploitation Task Force (XTF), which was in charge of the MET units, and she had also been forced to hold the story for three days so material in it could be deleted by military censors. The Times reporter had gotten close to a most important source—yet had ended up with a censored, secondhand account of his assertions.
When Steven Erlanger, a veteran foreign correspondent for the Times and now its culture editor, read the article on the morning of April 21, it struck him as weird. Erlanger h
ad long thought that Miller, particularly after writing the Saddam book with Laurie Mylroie, was “too engaged” to be covering this issue. And in the months before the war, he had sent memos to other editors noting that the paper should be careful in its coverage of the WMD question. Erlanger had worried that Times editors were not being sufficiently skeptical in reviewing the paper’s reporting on unconventional weapons in Iraq. And now he wondered if this particular Miller story was solid.
At a planning meeting for the next day’s paper, he waited for Executive Editor Howell Raines or Managing Editor Gerald Boyd to say something about the Miller article. But neither did. So Erlanger spoke up. “I said, ‘Excuse me, are we going to follow up the Judy Miller story?’ ” he later recalled remarking. What do you mean? Boyd asked. Erlanger said words to the effect of, “We’re way out there on this. We have a story on the front page that justifies the administration’s entire case for war, and it is based on information from someone we didn’t identify and we didn’t talk to.” There was silence in the room. Years afterward, Erlanger said, “It was like I crapped on the table.”
Immediately after the meeting, according to Erlanger, Boyd came into Erlanger’s office and angrily said, Don’t ever do that to me again. He insisted that Erlanger was not aware of all the work that had gone into that story. Erlanger rejoined, “That’s right, I read the article as any average reader would.” Boyd said if Erlanger had any concern, he could send him a memo. Then he left.
Within the Times, word spread of Boyd’s irate reaction to Erlanger. Miller was already considered a loose cannon by many of her peers at the Times, and some suspected her of embellishing stories (even while acknowledging she sometimes did get the goods). Her prewar reporting on Iraq’s WMDs had worried colleagues. “There was a general unease,” recalled one Times correspondent. “This was not because anyone knew her stories were wrong but because they were enthusiastic and boosterish…. She was reporting about the [WMD] intelligence with breathlessness and naiveté.” Still, Miller seemed to enjoy a special status at the paper. Why? She had won a Pulitzer Prize, but so had other reporters. She had once been a close pal of the publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., when they had both worked at the paper’s Washington bureau in the late 1970s. Times people wondered if that afforded her protection. They also saw that Raines was now keen on Miller’s stories “for the buzz” they created, as one Times reporter put it. In any event, reporters at the paper assumed—rightly or wrongly—that criticism of Miller or her work would not be appreciated by the higher-ups. By asking questions about her guy-in-a-baseball-cap story, Erlanger had trod upon sensitive territory. His confrontation with Boyd was regarded by other reporters, according to one Times correspondent, as a message from Raines and Boyd: We are riding Judy Miller and her reporting all the way. There was no backing down.
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