Hubris

by Michael Isikoff

  And still there were no weapons. Democrats on Capitol Hill were calling for investigations into prewar intelligence. How, they asked, could the White House have been so wrong about everything it had told the American public?

  THEN the CIA came through—or seemed to. On May 28, the CIA released a new and extraordinary six-page report declaring that a critical part of the prewar WMD case had been proven right. Earlier in the month, the Pentagon had announced the discovery of a tractor trailer outfitted with industrial equipment and maintained it was one of the mobile biological weapons labs that had been graphically described by Powell in his UN presentation. Judy Miller, just before leaving Iraq, had hailed this news in an article that quoted an unidentified Pentagon WMD expert saying that the trailer was “a smoking gun.”*49 But for weeks there had been no official confirmation.

  Now the CIA had it figured out. The agency’s public affairs office arranged a rare conference call for Washington reporters so officials could brief them about this important finding. This trailer and another one, the agency declared that day, were indeed the mobile bioweapons labs cited by Powell. The agency’s report, which also carried the imprimatur of the Defense Intelligence Agency, noted that the trailers contained a fermenter capable of producing biological agents as well as support equipment such as water supply tanks, an air compressor, a water chiller, and a system for collecting gases. It all amounted to an “interconnected” and “ingeniously simple, self-contained bioprocessing system” for “biological warfare.” The paper also dismissed one explanation for the trailers that had been offered by senior Iraqi officials—that they were to produce hydrogen for artillery weather balloons. This was a “cover story,” the white paper said, that was typical of the Iraqis’ “sophisticated denial and deception methods.”

  The CIA report was a godsend for the White House. “We have found the weapons of mass destruction,” Bush proclaimed the next day in an interview with a Polish television journalist. When the reporter asked what argument Bush could “use now to justify this war,” Bush pointed to the mobile BW labs: “You remember when Colin Powell stood up in front of the world, and he said, Iraq has got laboratories, mobile labs to build biological weapons…and we’ve so far discovered two. And we’ll find more weapons as time goes on. But for those who say we haven’t found the banned manufacturing devices or banned weapons, they’re wrong, we found them.”

  Inside the intelligence community, however, the paper generated fierce controversy. Many intelligence professionals found it full of holes, a shoddy piece of work that had been prepared more for public relations purposes than legitimate analysis. The document itself conceded that not a trace of biological agents had been found in the trailers. Why not? How was that possible? The CIA claimed the absence suggested that the Iraqis had “thoroughly decontaminated” the trailers—a claim some weapons experts thought implausible because it would have been virtually impossible to scrub trace residues from the trailers. There was also another problem spotted by government weapons analysts: the tanks in the supposed trailer labs didn’t have a drain. That was, one senior DIA analyst later noted, a “killer” issue. “You can’t foment biological weapons agents in a tank without a drain. You’d never be able to get rid of [the toxins]. You’d end up killing yourself.”

  Objections to the CIA analysis had emerged even before the white paper was released. In mid-May, a team of DIA contractors in Iraq examining the trailers had concluded that the trailers were not biological weapons labs. These results had been e-mailed back to Washington by the contractors—and ignored. But the CIA, particularly the analysts at WINPAC, had kept pushing the case and wouldn’t back down. The agency had tried to get DIA analysts to sign on to its assessment, but almost all of the defense agency’s experts on the subject refused to do so. It was almost as though the DIA’s analysts, feeling guilty for their prewar acquiescence, were now drawing a line in the sand. Then one night CIA officials contacted the one DIA analyst sympathetic to their position and obtained this analyst’s approval to place the DIA’s logo on the paper. “We were tricked,” the senior DIA analyst later exclaimed. “It still boggles my mind. That report was bogus. That was not one of the finest moments in intelligence analysis.”

  Officials at the State Department’s intelligence arm, INR, were also outraged. The CIA had refused to let INR participate in the review of the trailers. But when INR analysts read the CIA-DIA report, they “went ballistic,” according to Carl Ford, the State Department’s intelligence chief. Ford sent Powell a note: Be careful on this one. Don’t get out in front on it. It’s got problems. (The day the CIA released its report, Richard Boucher, the State Department spokesman, pointed to the paper to show that Powell had been on the money during his Security Council speech in February.) Then Ford received a phone call from Tenet’s office. The director of central intelligence wanted to see him.

  The next day, Ford entered the director’s conference room; Tenet and McLaughlin were waiting for him. And Tenet tore into him—for sending Powell that cautionary note questioning the CIA’s report. It was the first time he had ever seen the agency’s director so visibly upset. “Tenet was saying, how dare I write something like that!” Ford recalled. “ ‘You’re misinformed!’ ” Ford held his ground. Tenet told him, “You don’t know everything we know. You haven’t seen everything.” Ford shot back, “Why not? I thought I was supposed to see everything. You guys holding out on me?” In any case, Ford told them, “you better know more than I do because that report is one of the worst intelligence assessments I’ve ever read.” (Tenet and McLaughlin both later said they did not recall the conversation.)

  For Ford, this was a low point in the entire Iraq intelligence saga. The white-bearded Ford was a veteran intelligence professional who had worked at senior positions at the CIA, the State Department, and the Pentagon during the administrations of Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush. (Before taking the job as chief of INR, Ford had been offered a top foreign policy position in the White House by Cheney, whom Ford had worked for—and admired—when Cheney was secretary of defense.) And Ford had always gotten along well with Tenet and McLaughlin, despite the INR’s dissents from key parts of the agency’s prewar analysis of the Iraqi nuclear program.

  Ford saw Tenet’s reaction as a sign of how much the CIA director and his deputy, McLaughlin, had at stake—and of how much pressure they and the agency were under to justify their prewar findings. “It was clear they had been personally involved in the preparation of the report,” Ford recalled. “As it turned out, that analysis was unprofessional and even unethical. People did funny things with the evidence; they should have been shot.”

  What bothered Ford the most was the circular logic in the paper. One key element of proof that the CIA had cited—it was on the first page of the white paper—was that the trailers were “strikingly similar” to the descriptions of the biolabs that had been provided by “the chemical engineer” cited by Powell in his UN speech. This was a reference to Curveball. But the CIA well knew by this point that there were serious questions about the credibility of Curveball. His reliability (and the CIA’s inability to talk to him) had been the subject of angry debates within the agency for months. The CIA paper didn’t acknowledge that the source on which much of its bioweapons case rested may have been a flake—or a fabricator. In fact, the same WINPAC analyst who months earlier had defended Curveball (in the face of Tyler Drumheller’s warnings) had written the CIA report on the trailers. And this analyst was now using the trailers to validate WINPAC’s (and the CIA’s) decision to stand behind a suspect source. In Ford’s view, by failing to be upfront about the questions about Curveball, the CIA had crossed a line. This was, he thought, fundamentally dishonest.

  Years later, Ford was more bitter about this CIA paper than almost anything else in the Iraq weapons debate. He remained angry at its authors. “It wasn’t just that it was wrong,” he said. “They lied.”

  ON MAY 29, there was a small crisis in Dick Che
ney’s office. It had nothing to do with the front-page article in The Washington Post by Walter Pincus and Karen DeYoung that cited Cheney’s prewar assertions about Iraq’s WMDs as a primary example of administration statements that now looked wrong. (In an interview for the Post article, Wolfowitz had denied there had been any “oversell” of the WMD threat, but he acknowledged that there “had been a tendency to emphasize the WMD issue.”*50 ) Nor was the crisis triggered by information released that day by Representative Henry Waxman, a liberal Democrat, showing that Halliburton—of which Cheney had been the chief executive officer—had received more than half a billion dollars in military contracts relating to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in an arrangement that did not require the firm to bid on these jobs. Instead, Cheney press aides were overwhelmed by media calls about an item in a gossip column claiming that Cheney had told subordinates, “The way to lick this recession is to get all those deadbeats out of the soup kitchens.” The gossip columnist subsequently admitted she had made up this quote as a joke.

  But Scooter Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, had another press-related matter on his mind this day. Pincus had been calling the White House and Cheney’s office about the Kristof column.

  In the three weeks since Kristof had written about the unnamed ambassador’s trip to Niger, the controversy over the forged Niger documents and Bush’s State of the Union comments had continued, as part of a larger debate. Bush critics were claiming that the White House had intentionally misled the American public on Iraq’s WMDs. But the story of the former diplomat sent to Niger in response to an inquiry from Cheney’s office hadn’t registered with the media and the public.

  Catherine Martin, Cheney’s communications director, had taken the messages from Pincus and passed them to Libby, the vice president’s chief of staff. With a veteran national security reporter sniffing around about the Niger matter, Libby figured he ought to do some intelligence gathering on his own. He called Marc Grossman, the undersecretary of state, with a request: What could Grossman tell him about this ambassador and his trip to Niger?

  Do you expect me to commit a felony by telling you classified information?

  —SCOOTER LIBBY

  13

  The Leaking Begins

  IN EARLY June, Bush embarked on a whirlwind overseas trip that took him from a treaty signing in Saint Petersburg to a Middle East summit in Aqaba. But the emotional high came during an exhilarating stop at Camp al-Sayliyah in Qatar. More than 1,000 troops who had taken part in the invasion of Iraq gave a thunderous welcome to the president. “You set an example of skill and daring that will stand for all time,” he proclaimed. Bush said that “we’ve got a lot of work to do in Iraq. And we’re going to stay the course until the job gets done.” But he said progress was being made: “Day by day, the United States and our coalition partners are making the streets safer for the Iraqi citizens.”

  Nobody was more ebullient that day than Karl Rove. The White House political strategist whipped out a camera and began offering to take pictures of soldiers posing with top White House aides. “Step right up,” Rove boomed. “Get your photo with Ari Fleischer—get ’em while they’re hot. Get your Condi Rice.”

  On the way home, Air Force One, escorted by U.S. fighter planes, flew over Iraq. As the jets crossed Baghdad and dipped low, Bush huddled with Rice and Powell as they gazed out the window. The president pointed out some of the city’s landmarks. Press accounts that day called it a “victory lap.”

  But away from the cheering troops, Bush was getting frustrated. At one point during the trip, when he and aides were reviewing a speech aboard Air Force One, Bush questioned a line that had been drafted for him. Is this true? he asked. Yes, Mr. President, he was told, it’s been vetted. “Oh, yeah, just like the WMD we found,” Bush snapped, according to an aide who was present. This was a snide remark, the aide said—an obvious reference to the overstated we-found-the-weapons comment Bush had made before leaving Washington. It seemed to this aide that the WMD flap was getting to the president. And when Bush was in Qatar, during a meeting with top U.S. commanders, he demanded to know who was in charge of the WMD search. He turned to Paul Bremer, his viceroy in Iraq, and asked if it was his job to find the weapons. No, said Bremer. Bush put the same question to General Tommy Franks. The general said the WMD hunt was not his responsibility. Then who? an exasperated Bush exclaimed. Someone in the meeting mentioned Stephen Cambone, referring to the undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Who’s that? Bush asked.

  In the weeks to come, the hunt for WMDs would get a new commander. But the search would be no more successful. The embarrassing failure to find weapons would lead to new disclosures and sharper questions about what the administration had known—or chosen to ignore—before the war. The controversy would push Joe Wilson to go public and set off open warfare between the White House and the CIA.

  DAVID KAY had come to Langley to lend the CIA a hand. The former UN and International Atomic Energy Agency weapons inspector in Iraq was part of a review panel of outside experts vetting a new National Intelligence Estimate on North Korea. After Kay finished looking at the draft, John McLaughlin, the deputy director, asked to see him. He wanted to know what Kay thought of the ongoing search for weapons in Iraq. Kay, who had been in Iraq as an NBC News consultant, said he had never seen such a screwed-up operation. The MET teams had been poorly equipped. Their members hadn’t been sufficiently trained in biological, chemical, or nuclear matters. They had been working off a list of suspected WMD sites that increasingly looked like a roster of dead ends. They had been relying too much on Ahmad Chalabi’s INC for leads.

  McLaughlin picked up the phone and called Tenet. Moments later, Kay was next door in the CIA director’s office. Okay, Tenet asked him, what would you do? Not go looking under rocks, Kay said. Saddam’s weapons program, he explained, must have had a tremendous infrastructure full of not only scientists and military officers but clerks, truck drivers, and janitors. Find these people, Kay said, and you’ll find the weapons. And Iraq was loaded with documents. When Kay had been there, he had seen people trying to peddle former government papers. Records needed to be secured and examined. An effective search, Kay said, would have to be an intelligence-driven operation. It would require plenty of resources—meaning money. Tenet and McLaughlin listened; then the meeting was done.

  A few days later, during the second weekend in June, Kay was at a spa outside Washington celebrating his wedding anniversary when Tenet tracked him down to ask if he would take over the search. Kay was being offered a unique berth: special assistant to the director of central intelligence and chief strategist for the Iraq Survey Group, the new Pentagon-created outfit now responsible for the WMD hunt. Kay would be in charge of the weapons search. He said yes, but only if the CIA would meet his demands: all the necessary resources and authority to keep the ISG focused solely on the WMD mission. “I told George, I’m taking on your moral hazard,” Kay recalled. “Your agency said there were WMDs there.” Tenet assured Kay he would have whatever he needed.

  Tenet wanted Kay to head to Kuwait immediately and meet up with the ISG. No, said Kay. He first wanted to see exactly what the Bush administration really had known about Saddam’s deadly arsenal before the war. He parked himself in a conference room at the CIA and began reviewing all the prewar intelligence on Saddam’s weapons programs. “Now I’ll get the good stuff,” he thought to himself.

  Before him were various reports. Highly classified. The best the CIA had. But as he read the documents, he shook his head. He wasn’t coming across any undeniable evidence. The intelligence either was overly general or had originated with problematic sources. “On the trailers,” he later said, “I cannot tell you how discouraged I was to see it was based on a single source—Curveball. No one knew his name. No American had spoken to him.” He spotted the dissents of Energy Department scientists on the aluminum tubes and wondered why they had been given less weight than the evaluation of the CIA’s WINPAC. The Energy Depa
rtment scientists were the experts, not the desk analysts at WINPAC. Nothing was hard and strong. The more Kay read, the more disheartened he became. He thought of a favorite old tune. It was the Peggy Lee song “Is That All There Is?”

  GRUFF and idiosyncratic, Walter Pincus had been covering national security issues for The Washington Post for decades. He had written some of the few skeptical accounts about prewar intelligence that had appeared in the paper before the war (though most had been buried inside and received little attention). In early June, with the weapons search faltering, Pincus’s sources within the intelligence community were opening up. This was a sign of rising tension between the intelligence community and the White House. And Pincus and his colleague Dana Priest were taking full advantage of it.

  On June 5, they reported on the paper’s front page that Cheney and Libby, according to senior intelligence officials, had “made multiple trips to the CIA” over the past year to question analysts about Iraq. Two days later, Pincus and Priest had another front-page article that compared Bush’s prewar public statements with a recently disclosed classified DIA report from the fall of 2002 that warned that there was “no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing or stockpiling chemical weapons.”