Hubris

by Michael Isikoff

  In a way, the Times editors were behaving like White House officials: both institutions were standing by their prewar assertions. The Times hadn’t been the only major news outlet before the invasion to publish or broadcast stories that made it seem that Saddam had hoarded nightmarish amounts of WMDs. And Miller hadn’t been the only Times correspondent who had engaged in such reporting. But she had written more of such stories than most, and, due to her prominence, they had been the most consequential. They had been quoted by Cheney and been cited in the White House paper “A Decade of Deception and Defiance” drafted by WHIG member Jim Wilkinson to bolster Bush’s UN speech in September. And now Miller was still working that beat, determined to prove she had been right all along.

  THE day after her Iraqi-in-the baseball-cap story ran, Miller was interviewed from Iraq about her scoop on PBS’s NewsHour. “I think they found something more than a smoking gun,” she said about the discovery of the alleged scientist. “What they’ve found is what is being called here by members of MET Alpha…a silver bullet.” Miller asserted that Saddam had engaged in “mass destruction” of WMD stockpiles right before the invasion. “What’s become clear,” she stated, “is the extent to which Iraq and this regime was able to pull the wool over the eyes of the international inspectors.”

  Miller was vindicating the faith that top Pentagon officials had placed in her when they approved her unique MET Alpha embed. Judy Miller “is probably the best ally we have out there in the media,” Colonel Richard McPhee, the commander of the 75th Exploitation Task Force told one of the unit’s public affairs officers, Sergeant Eugene Pomeroy, according to an e-mail Pomeroy sent to a colleague.

  The next day, Miller had a follow-up article in the Times. It reported the supposed Iraqi scientist had caused MET Alpha to change its strategy.*47 The unit was now trying to find Iraqis who had worked on unconventional weapons programs. Toward that end, she noted, the MET Alpha team would be turning for help to an important new source of information: Ahmad Chalabi. The INC chief had returned to Iraq with Pentagon backing and had set up a compound in a former sporting club in Baghdad. MET Alpha, in its search for postwar leads, would soon be relying on the same questionable source who had provided so much faulty prewar intelligence to the U.S. government and to Miller and the Times.

  Miller hadn’t lost any of her faith in Chalabi. She quickly started serving as the broker between MET Alpha and the INC chief. In a brazen move for a journalist, she also started influencing the WMD unit’s activities. At one point, she led MET Alpha officers to Chalabi’s headquarters and arranged for the transfer of Saddam’s son-in-law, Jamal Sultan al-Tikriti, from the INC to the U.S. military. A Chalabi spokesman later told The Washington Post that the INC had gotten into contact with Miller to hand over Sultan because “we thought it was a good story” and “we needed some way to get the guy to the Americans.”

  When Colonel McPhee, commander of the 75th XTF, ordered MET Alpha to leave Baghdad for Talil, a town in the south, Miller was infuriated. She thought MET Alpha should remain in Baghdad and continue working with Chalabi and the INC. She confronted Eugene Pomeroy, the unit’s public affairs officer, and protested the order. He told her to put it in writing, and Miller quickly dashed off a snippy handwritten note:

  The hunt for WMD is here, not in Talil. I’m assigned to cover that hunt. I want to remain here in Baghdad without disembedding until MET Alpha returns to Baghdad with the 75th XTF, when I shall rejoin them. I see no reason for me to waste time (or Met Alpha, for that matter) in Talil…. Request permission to stay on here with Ahmad Cha

  Miller then crossed out the reference to Chalabi and continued writing:

  colleagues at the Palestine Hotel til Met Alpha returns or order to return [to Talil] is rescinded. I intend to write about this decision in the NYTimes to send a successful team back…just as progress on WMD is being made.

  Pomeroy couldn’t believe Miller’s note. “It was a threat, of course,” he later said. She was trying to blackmail the military: reverse this order, or I’ll blast you in The New York Times. “I thought to myself, this is something that is going to bite her in the ass,” Pomeroy recalled. “The journalist is here as an observer. If you want to run around with Ahmad Chalabi, looking for baseball-hatted scientists, that’s your own business. But to interfere with the operations of a military unit, it was unconscionable.” But Miller got her way. She complained directly to General Petraeus, who then suggested to Colonel McPhee he cancel the order to return to Talil. The colonel did so.

  Miller’s note indicated that she considered Chalabi the key to finding WMD-related evidence—just as she had before the war. Days later, after she was chastised by John Burns, the chief of the paper’s Baghdad bureau, for writing about Chalabi without coordinating with his bureau, Miller sent Burns an e-mail noting that she had been “covering Chalabi for about 10 years” and that he had “provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper.” She was acknowledging that the Times’ coverage of perhaps the most important national security issue of recent years had been shaped by a controversial Iraqi exile whose reliability and honesty had repeatedly been challenged by the CIA and the State Department.

  Years later, Raines would tell The New Yorker that “I did not know Judy’s sources.” But Miller’s reliance on Chalabi was no secret—to Raines or to top editors at the Times. In a May 5, 2003, e-mail to Raines and Boyd in New York, Miller even sought to lay exclusive claim to the INC leader. Miller protested in the note that Patrick Tyler, another Times reporter who had just been made the paper’s Baghdad bureau chief, had organized a lunch for Chalabi without inviting her. She complained that Tyler intended to write about Chalabi’s relationship with Jordanian King Abdullah and his problems at the Petra Bank (the institution Chalabi had been convicted in absentia of defrauding). Miller told the two editors that she had planned to do that same story—and that Chalabi had promised her files on this matter. “As you know,” Miller wrote, “I’m at Chalabi’s every day because MET Alpha has a very sensitive relationship with his intell people—a sharing of people and documents on WMD.”

  In the e-mail, Miller boasted of her “extremely close contacts with Chalabi” and the INC and noted that ever since she had arrived in Iraq, she had been “systematically cultivating their trust and renewing our relationship.” She added, “Ultimately, Chalabi may provide not only the most important WMD info, but other info on terrorists, which, quite frankly, he has promised to give to me. That relationship is not transferable.”

  But Chalabi was unable to help Miller or the MET Alpha unit find any weapons. And the mood within the unit was getting antsy. The other two MET teams, assigned to investigating Saddam’s war crimes, were scoring successes. They were discovering mass graves that were visceral and undeniable evidence of Saddam’s brutality. But within MET Alpha and its companion unit, MET Bravo, the questions were growing. “It was extremely frustrating,” Tewfik Boulenouar, MET Alpha’s translator, later said. The team was being sent to locations that had been on a prewar list of possible WMD sites. But, Boulenouar said, “it was obvious to us that the Iraqis wouldn’t leave the WMDs in the same place. We knew before we got to these places we wouldn’t find anything.” Every day, Pomeroy recalled, the members of those units would be asked the same thing: “So did you guys find anything?” The answer was always no. “I remember this feeling, so why did we do this?” Pomeroy said. “Everything we’d been told up to that point is, we had WMD there. We were scouring the landscape, and we hadn’t found squat.”

  ON MAY 1, in a carefully choreographed event, the White House arranged for Bush to land on a jet aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. Speaking under a huge banner that declared “Mission Accomplished,” Bush proclaimed that “major combat operations” in Iraq were over and that the United States had “prevailed.” He was equally bullish on the hunt for weapons, saying the U.S. military had “begun” the search and we “already know of hundreds of sites that will be investigate
d.”

  But two days later, during a brief meeting with reporters at his ranch in Crawford, Bush offered a new take, one of many such shifts he would be forced to make on the weapons issue. First, Bush offered what had become the official line: “We’ll find them. And it’s just going to be a matter of time.” But then he remarked, “But what we’re going—the world will find is, the man had a program to develop weapons of mass destruction.” The president was not talking about actual stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, the prewar claim. He was now talking about a program to develop weapons.

  THAT same weekend, Joe Wilson was hobnobbing with dozens of Democratic senators at a hotel on the Chesapeake Bay in eastern Maryland. The lawmakers had gathered to discuss various policy matters and to listen to experts. Wilson was there to serve on a panel examining what might lay ahead in Iraq. Other speakers participating in this session included University of Maryland professor Shibley Telhami and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. The mood of the Democrats was quite dark. “At the conference, in private, they were far more critical of the decision to go to war and of Bush’s handling of the war than they were in public,” recalled one participant.

  Throughout the weekend retreat, conversations continued between the panels. And Wilson freely participated in them, as he made the rounds with his wife. “I’ve known Joe for years,” Telhami later said, “and this may have been the first time I met Valerie. I thought she was something like an energy executive.” At some point—either during the panel or an informal discussion—Wilson referred to his trip to Niger. This caught Kristof’s attention. He asked Wilson if he could write about it. Wilson said yes, as long as Kristof didn’t name him. And days later, on May 6, the first public reference to Wilson’s trip appeared—on the op-ed page of The New York Times. In his column, Kristof, addressing the absent WMDs, wrote, “There are indications that the U.S. government souped up intelligence, leaned on spooks to change their conclusions and concealed contrary information to deceive people at home and around the world.” He referred to the Niger charge:

  Consider the now-disproved claims by President Bush and Colin Powell that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger so it could build nuclear weapons….

  I’m told by a person involved in the Niger caper that more than a year ago the vice president’s office asked for an investigation of the uranium deal, so a former U.S. ambassador to Africa was dispatched to Niger. In February 2002, according to someone present at the meetings, that envoy reported to the C.I.A. and State Department that the information was unequivocally wrong and that the documents had been forged.

  The envoy reported, for example, that a Niger minister whose signature was on one of the documents had in fact been out of office for more than a decade. In addition, the Niger mining program was structured so that the uranium diversion had been impossible. The envoy’s debunking of the forgery was passed around the administration and seemed to be accepted—except that President Bush and the State Department kept citing it anyway.

  Kristof got the story more right than not—though there were some mistakes. The CIA’s report on Wilson’s mission hadn’t had the impact within the administration that Kristof’s column suggested. And Wilson had not debunked the Niger documents by reporting that a particular minister had been out of office at the time of the deal (as the IAEA had later found). In fact, Wilson had never seen the Niger papers. His trip had occurred eight months before the State Department and CIA had received the actual forged documents from Italian journalist Elisabetta Burba in October 2002.*48

  Still, Wilson had returned from Niamey with a report that he thought seriously discredited the Niger allegation—and his information was ignored. It was a tangible, discrete example of how prewar intelligence had been mishandled; and what’s more, there appeared to be a real-life source out there willing to talk about it. Few in the Washington media and political world knew who Kristof’s unnamed ambassador was. But it wouldn’t take long for a Washington Post reporter to figure it out.

  ON MAY 12, 2003, L. Paul Bremer III, the administrator appointed by Bush to head the newly created Coalition Provisional Authority, arrived in Baghdad. Bremer, a cool, self-confident State Department veteran, had been dispatched to replace the seemingly befuddled Jay Garner as the number one U.S. official on the scene. Four days later, Bremer issued Order Number One: a sweeping directive for the de-Baathification of Iraqi society. The idea of uprooting all remnants of Saddam’s hated regime had been approved by the White House—and championed by Chalabi and the INC. It was part of the fundamental vision of the war’s advocates: to create a new liberal democracy in the Middle East built in America’s image. The order had been drafted by Doug Feith’s office in the Pentagon. “We’ve got to show all the Iraqis that we’re serious about building a new Iraq,” Feith had told Bremer before he left. “And that means that Saddam’s instruments of repression have no role in that new nation.”

  But how exactly was the decree to be implemented? There were more than 2 million members of the Baath Party. Under Saddam, party membership had been a requirement for almost all government jobs—in the police, in the universities, in sanitation. How many government workers were to be fired? Bremer, under instructions from Bush, took an expansive view of the order. The top three layers of management in every government institution—even the hospitals—were to be reviewed for possible Baath Party connections, he decreed. When he first briefed the staff he inherited from Jay Garner’s ORHA about de-Baathification, Bremer wrote in an e-mail to his wife, there had been “a sea of bitching and moaning with lots of them saying how hard it was going to be. But I reminded them that the president’s guidance is clear: de-Baathification will be carried out even if at a cost to administrative efficiency.”

  Iraq’s new de-Baathification commission was cochaired by Chalabi. Working closely with his nephew and political adviser, Salem Chalabi, the INC chief obtained Baath Party membership and payment records and implemented a sweeping purge. “He was using it to settle scores,” said one senior NSC official. The White House, according to this official, was soon getting alarming reports of basic civic services breaking down, because thousands of trash collectors, police, and teachers were being ousted in Chalabi’s purge.

  On May 23, Bremer issued CPA Order Number Two, “Dissolution of Entities,” abolishing the Iraqi Army. Overnight, 400,000 Iraqi soldiers were out of work, without pay, and with nowhere to go. Angry former soldiers were soon gathering outside the gates of the CPA; the disbanding of their army was a “humiliation to the dignity of the nation,” read one banner. Like de-Baathification, the order had been drafted by Feith’s office and approved by the White House, ignoring the advice of the State Department’s Future of Iraq Group. By dissolving the Army, the Bush administration, State Department adviser David Phillips subsequently wrote, had “committed one of the greatest errors in the history of U.S. warfare: It unnecessarily increased the ranks of its enemies.”

  The CIA’s John Maguire, who had just arrived in Iraq to help set up the CIA’s Baghdad station, started getting complaints about both actions from his Iraqi contacts. The dissolution of the Army, Maguire later said, “disenfranchised people with guns, and it got rid of the technocrats—the people who ran the society—because it was a militarized society. It was a cataclysmic mistake.” De-Baathification might have been worse. The Arabic word used in official documents to describe the de-Baathification decree was ijtithaath. It meant to uproot by root and branch, like a weed. But the connotation for many Iraqis was annihilation or eradication. To many Iraqis, Maguire later explained, it sounded like the Final Solution. Maguire was appalled. “We told Bremer that’s a heinous word,” he recalled. “He blew it off.” This was a disaster in the making, Maguire feared.

  Maguire, who had helped write the Anabasis plan and ferventy believed in the war, was already worried that U.S. policies in Iraq were heading the wrong way. There seemed to be no real plan for what to do now. Iraqis, he noted, saw the lack of elec
tricity and the U.S. failure to stop the looting as punishments being inflicted on them by Washington: “The goodwill was dissipating.” From the outset, the CIA station, according to Maguire, was warning about the problems—and was cut out of critical planning sessions by the Pentagon and Bremer.

  BY THE end of May, the news out of Iraq was getting worse. On the ground, looting was continuing, crime was rising, and there were increasing signs of an insurgency taking root. Military commanders were grousing that Rumsfeld had not supplied enough troops to manage the postinvasion challenges. Lieutenant General David McKiernan, commander of U.S. ground forces in Iraq, was telling reporters that the “war has not ended” and that the violent actions of the resistance were “not criminal activities, they are combat activities.” And Bush’s management of the war was coming under fire. “When is the president going to tell the American people that we’re likely to be in the country of Iraq for three, four, five, six, eight, ten years, with thousands of forces and spending billions of dollars? Because it’s not been told to them yet,” Democratic Senator Joe Biden demanded of Paul Wolfowitz at a foreign relations committee hearing. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel complained, “We may have underestimated or mischaracterized the challenges of establishing security and rebuilding Iraq.”