Hubris

by Michael Isikoff

  It wasn’t just troops who were upset. “George and myself and McLaughlin and [James] Pavitt [the DO chief]—everybody was pissed,” said Buzzy Krongard, the agency’s executive director. For all the bad blood between the White House and Langley, some senior agency officials were reluctant to believe the leak had been the product of a White House plot. But Krongard, who knew Valerie Wilson slightly, was the only senior agency official to reach out to her. He called her on the phone and said, “This is outrageous. Whatever I can do to help, let me know. The whole building is with you on this.” Wilson thanked him. But she was not so sure the rest of the agency brass was with her.

  In assessing the impact of the leak, CIA officials were concerned mostly about the people Wilson had recruited over the years and the informants she had worked with, even while working on the Iraqi WMD issue. “We were more worried about her sources,” said Krongard. There was also the possible exposure of Brewster-Jennings & Associates, the front company that the CIA had used to provide paper cover (as opposed to operational cover) to Wilson and other CIA operatives for tax records, insurance purposes, and other paperwork matters. (When Valerie Wilson made a contribution to Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 1999, she listed her employer as “Brewster-Jennings & Associates” and her occupation as “analyst”—as Novak first revealed in early October 2003.) This firm, according to business records, had a Boston address, but there was no Brewster-Jennings office at that address.

  Valerie Wilson remained worried by the disclosure. She submitted to her superiors her own assessment of the damage that could be caused by the leak. Meanwhile, she continued with her transition to the new administration job, realizing her chances of ever returning to operations were shot.

  Tenet said nothing about the leak publicly. And he didn’t immediately push for an investigation. “I had to remind [Pavitt] that he ought to make a referral to Justice,” a senior CIA official later said. And the CIA’s lawyers got on the job. On July 24, a CIA attorney left a phone message for the chief of the Justice Department’s counterespionage section. It was a heads-up: The agency was reviewing the Novak column. Six days later, the CIA counsel’s office sent a letter to the Justice Department’s criminal division notifying it that a possible violation of criminal law had occurred. The CIA informed the division that its own Office of Security was examining the leak.

  This was all standard operating procedure for leak cases. First, the CIA investigated; then, if its lawyers believed a law might have been broken, the agency requested an FBI investigation. The Justice Department even had a form—the “DOJ Media Leak Questionnaire”—that an agency had to fill out when it wanted the FBI to investigate a national security leak. There were eleven questions on the form. One asked, “What specific statements in the article are classified and was the information properly classified?” Another asked, “What effect the disclosure of the classified data might have on the national defense?” And the form requested that the agency affirm that the exposed information was truly a secret. No investigation would proceed unless the CIA indicated that Valerie Wilson’s employment at the CIA had been classified information.

  The Plame leak hadn’t sparked much of a public controversy, but CIA lawyers were moving along methodically. The filing of a criminal leak report was not that unusual. The agency submitted about one a week, and about “99 percent of them go nowhere,” as one agency official put it. But this was one Washington leak that wouldn’t go away.

  I’m not sure I’ve spoken to anyone at that level who seemed less inquisitive.

  —DAVID KAY, CHIEF WMD HUNTER

  16

  The Incurious President

  IT WAS the middle of the night in Baghdad. There was a pounding on the door. David Kay got out of bed. A staff officer of the Iraq Survey Group was at the door. He had an important message for the man who had been sent to Iraq to find Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction: the vice president’s office had called.

  Kay looked at the message. Cheney’s office had a burning question for him: Had he seen a particular signals intercept? It was a highly sensitive communications intercept that had captured a snippet of conversation between two unidentified people. Cheney’s aides were reading raw transcripts straight from the National Security Agency. And a Cheney staffer who had gotten hold of this piece of unanalyzed intelligence thought that it contained a reference to a WMD storage site in Iraq, even though the captured exchange didn’t specifically mention weapons. What made this intercept most promising was that it had come with geographic coordinates for one of the unidentified persons. Here was a road map—finally—to Saddam’s WMDs. Kay ordered his analysts to review the coordinates and went back to bed.

  The next morning, his analysts checked the coordinates and discovered they referred to a site in the Bekka Valley in Lebanon—not anywhere in Iraq. This was no lead. It was nothing. But as Kay was overseeing the search for weapons in the summer months of 2003, the vice president’s office urgently wanted him to come up with evidence that Saddam had maintained arsenals of weapons of mass destruction—so much so that, just as Cheney and Libby had done before the war, the vice president’s aides were rummaging through top secret, unprocessed intelligence in the hope of discovering what everyone else in the U.S. government had missed. “They were reaching down and reading raw intelligence and putting their own meaning on it,” said a CIA official familiar with the incident.

  With the administration—and Cheney—facing increasing challenges to their prewar arguments for invasion, Kay and his Iraq Survey Group were their best hope. Nothing would trump the fuss over the sixteen words, the NIE, and the Plame leak better than a discovery of real weapons or undeniable evidence Saddam had been trying to build a nuclear bomb. But Kay, who had favored the war and who had come to Iraq believing Saddam had possessed stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, would end up sinking, not supporting, the administration’s case.

  THE signals intercept was not the only intelligence tip Cheney’s office urgently passed on to Kay. On another occasion, the vice president’s aides sent a message to Kay and the ISG: check out this overhead photograph. It showed what looked like the opening of a tunnel on the side of a hill in Iraq. This could be where the WMDs were hidden, Cheney’s office said—in caves.

  When Kay and several of his analysts took a look at the photo, they burst out laughing. They knew exactly what was in the picture. It was a common practice for local farmers to use bulldozers to dig trenches into the sides of hills. Because the water table was fairly high, these trenches would fill with water and become sources of drinking water for cows. The vice president’s staff hadn’t discovered the elusive WMDs; it had found a bovine watering hole. “Anyone who has spent any time on the ground in Iraq immediately would recognize these as cuts that the local population made to get to ground water for their animals,” Kay said later. “We reported back that we had looked at it and it was not what you thought it was. There was no point humiliating them.”

  Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz was also watching the work of the Iraq Survey Group closely, and there was a particular topic he thought deserved Kay’s attention: Mohamed Atta and his alleged visit to Prague. As part of its mission, the ISG was poring over millions of documents—seven and a half miles of them. The papers, rounded up and kept in a secured facility, were being scanned into a computer database. Trying to find WMD clues in this massive amount of paper was a daunting task. (And the ISG was constantly being approached by Iraqis peddling documents on weapons—which were usually worthless or forged.) But Wolfowitz wanted Kay’s WMD pursuers to look for one more thing in this monster haystack: evidence that would prove that the lead 9/11 hijacker had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in the Czech capital five months prior to September 11. Several times Major General Keith Dayton, the military commander of the Iraq Survey Group, conveyed Wolfowitz’s request to Kay. “Oh, shit,” Kay said to himself, “why waste time on this?” But, he thought, it’s Laurie Mylroie.


  Wolfowitz’s request, as Kay later put it, “bore no relationship to my mission,” but he passed it along to his document exploitation crew. Don’t pull anyone off the WMD beat, he told the team, but if you see anything on Atta, grab it. No records connecting Atta to Iraqi intelligence surfaced. The ISG documents examiners did find plenty of papers linking Iraqi intelligence to various terrorist groups, mostly anti-Israel and anti-Iran outfits. But nothing came up regarding operational ties to al-Qaeda.

  KAY had been running the ISG’s search since mid-June, working out of the Water Palace outside Baghdad. The group employed about 1,300 people, including only a couple dozen weapons experts to do the serious analysis. The game plan was not look here, look there, and hope to unearth a massive cache of deadly armaments. The mission was a human intelligence job. Kay calculated that Saddam’s weapons programs had employed about 10,000 people. Get some of those Iraqis to talk, and the puzzle would be solved. He even had a slush fund of $10 million to pay informants.

  Kay was starting from scratch. When he got to Baghdad, he asked for the reports of the 75th Exploitation Task Force, which had overseen the work of the two MET teams that had originally been assigned to the weapons search. But he was told there were no available records. The 75th had left nothing behind. He couldn’t find out which sites had been previously inspected or which Iraqis had been interrogated. He was also dismayed that the U.S. Army had done little to secure Iraqi ammunition sites. “The military just blew this off,” Kay said.

  Still, Kay was optimistic, at least when he talked publicly about the weapons hunt. During an interview with NBC News’ Tom Brokaw, who was in Baghdad in the middle of July, Kay proclaimed himself confident that he would uncover evidence of WMDs.*63 “We’re finding progress reports [on WMDs],” he said to the anchor. And he added, “I’ve already seen enough to convince me, but that’s not the standard. I’ve got to have enough to convince everyone of that.” He said he expected to have “a substantial body of evidence” within six months.

  But in his private communications to the CIA, Kay was conveying a different message. Each week, he sent e-mail updates to George Tenet and John McLaughlin. And by the end of July, Kay was telling both that his Iraq Survey Group was more likely to uncover evidence of a production surge capacity—that is, programs that could quickly manufacture a limited amount of chemical or biological weapons once there was an order to do so—but not actual stockpiles of unconventional weapons. As Kay and the ISG examined the leading elements of the prewar WMD case—the aluminum tubes, the mobile biological weapons labs, the chemical weapons depots—they were coming up empty.

  The tubes were the first to go. The high-strength aluminum tubes had been central to the charge that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, the one hard piece of evidence to support White House speechwriter Michael Gerson’s “smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud” metaphor. From Cheney on Meet the Press to Powell before the UN Security Council, the administration’s top officials had argued that the Iraqis were acquiring tubes that could be used for nuclear centrifuges. The International Atomic Energy Agency had concluded before the war that the tubes had been intended for rocket production and not centrifuges. And when Iraq Survey Group members arrived at the Nasr munitions plant, where the Iraqis manufactured their 81 mm artillery rockets, they found endless rows of the tubes. In plain sight, David Kay’s weapons hunters could see the proof for themselves. (The plant was later looted, and the ransacked tubes showed up on the streets, sold for drainpipes.)

  Kay’s team still had questions. Why had the Iraqis needed such high-strength tubes for rockets? ISG investigators questioned the Iraqi plant managers. They also interrogated the senior official who had overseen Saddam’s military industrial commission. All the Iraqis told a consistent story: the rockets had been falling short. The problem was the propellant. But changing the propellant—the obvious solution—wasn’t an option. The propellant was produced at a facility run by a friend of one of Saddam’s sons. So to avoid interfering with the flow of business to a regime crony, the engineers devised a Rube Goldberg solution: lower the mass of the rockets and use tubes that had a higher strength than otherwise necessary. That was why the Iraqis had been using the Internet to procure tubes with unusually precise specifications. (The whole thing reminded Kay of some of the Pentagon’s own procurement messes.) “We had this down,” Kay later said. “The system was corrupt.”

  Before long, Kay reached a harsh but firm conclusion about one of the fundamental selling points in the White House case for war. “The tubes issue,” he said, “was an absolute fraud.”

  Nor did the Iraq Survey Group uncover any other evidence of an active nuclear program. Team members inspected the enormous Taiwatha nuclear facility outside Baghdad and other nuclear sites. They found a decayed infrastructure, aging machine tools, and other equipment that hadn’t been used for years. They interviewed Iraq’s former nuclear scientists, all of whom described a nuclear program that had been dormant since after the first Persian Gulf War. They examined records trying to find any trace of signs that Iraq had been seeking uranium abroad. Once again, there was nothing. (And with no active nuclear weapons program, Iraq had had no need for hundreds of tons of yellowcake.)

  The mobile biological weapons trailers weren’t panning out, either. A team of Pentagon examiners and INR analysts had already disputed the CIA’s finding that these trucks had been built to cook up anthrax and other biological agents. But the ISG’s guiding principle was that it should do its own work and not react to previous conclusions. And it didn’t take long for Kay’s experts to determine that these trailers were not what the CIA—and the president—had claimed they were.

  In mid-July, Hamish Killip, a veteran British weapons inspector who specialized in chemical and biological weapons, arrived in Baghdad to join Kay’s team. On the way from the airport to ISG headquarters, he rode past the military camp where the trailers were being stored. He told his driver to pull over and left the car to eyeball the notorious trailers. Right away he had his doubts. The trailers were, he later said, “not a proper piece of work.” They had been poorly assembled; the welding was substandard, the materials were inferior. There was no way, he thought, that they could have been used for microbiological work. “You’d have better luck putting a couple of dustbins on the back of a truck and brewing it in there,” he later said.

  Much of the case for the trailers had rested on the credibility of Curveball, the Iraqi defector whose account (fed through German intelligence) had been a key part of Powell’s presentation to the Security Council. In May, the CIA had concluded that the trailers were biolabs because they appeared to resemble what Curveball had described before the war. If they did, it was coincidence. When Kay’s investigators dug deep into Curveball’s background and unearthed new information about this all-important defector, nothing in his story withstood scrutiny.

  “Relatively quickly, we realized there were real problems with Curveball,” Kay remembered. Kay’s investigators obtained his real name from sources in British intelligence; the Germans had refused to provide it to the CIA. Then they pulled his personnel file from an Iraqi government storeroom. Curveball had claimed to be at the top of his engineering class. The ISG found that he had actually finished at the bottom. He had claimed to have been a project chief or site manager for the Chemical & Engineering Design Center, a division of the Iraqi Military Industrial Commission. Yet the records showed he had been only a low-level trainee. The file also showed Curveball had been fired from his job in 1995—two years before he claimed to have been working on building one of the biolabs, three years before he claimed to have witnessed a horrific accident involving biological weapons. After being dismissed from his job, he had ended up driving a Baghdad taxi. When the investigators interviewed his former bosses and coworkers, they all denied working on any biolabs—and dismissed Curveball’s accounts as ludicrous. Some of his old friends described him as a “great liar” and “con artist.” A CIA inve
stigator working with the Iraq Survey Group said, “People kept saying what a ‘rat’ Curveball was.” And an ISG team member later told the Los Angeles Times, “They were saying, ‘This guy? You’ve got to be kidding.’ ”

  Kay’s investigators even tracked down Curveball’s family in a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood. The Germans had consistently told the CIA that Curveball couldn’t speak English and hated Americans; that was supposedly the reason the CIA couldn’t talk to him. But when Kay’s investigators asked Curveball’s mother about this, they got a puzzled response. “No, no!” she said. “He loves Americans!” Curveball’s parents took Kay’s team into Curveball’s old room. It was full of posters of American pop stars. “They said he always wanted to go to the United States and that he spoke English,” Kay said.

  Not everything was settled for the ISG. There were plenty of documents to review. Clearly, Iraq had been working on prohibited missiles. (According to Kay, former Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz told U.S. interrogators “that Saddam had said to him as long as we don’t put WMDs on the end of a missile it was all right to have these missiles. Aziz said he had tried to tell Saddam that was not right.”) And the ISG kept finding small laboratories in houses tucked into buildings—many of which had been ransacked, making it difficult to determine what they had been used for. Kay’s specialists theorized the labs might have developed poisons to be used by Iraqi intelligence services for political assassination.