The Iraq Survey Group had no luck locating the chemical weapons arsenals Bush and others had said Saddam possessed. “We had a number of people who purported to know where CW was buried,” Kay recalled. “We checked them all out, but nothing. We combed the records.” And Kay found nothing to support the administration’s claims that the unmanned drones—the UAVs—were being produced to carry chemical and biological payloads. Kay’s investigators closely inspected the drones. “We knew the range, navigation, and payload capability,” Kay said. “There was no way this was a threat to anyone.”
IN WASHINGTON, Robert Joseph, the hard-line National Security Council official for proliferation issues (who had approved the sixteen words), was unconcerned about the absence of unconventional weapons in Iraq. Joseph, who had relentlessly pushed the WMD case before the war, was—on almost a daily basis—waving off the worries of his colleagues, many of whom had become quite nervous, one NSC staffer recalled. The weapons were about to turn up, Joseph assured them. “It’s just a matter of time,” he said on a number of occasions, recalled the NSC staffer. “We’re going to find them any day now.” Joseph had placed much stock in the trailers. This was the proof that the White House had been right all along, he argued. When Iraqi scientists were quoted as saying the trailers had been used to produce hydrogen for weather balloons, Joseph, with much sarcasm, dismissed the claim. “Yeah, right, give me a break,” Joseph said, according to the colleague. This was, as Joseph saw it, just another Iraqi lie.
When Kay came back to Washington to brief the Senate intelligence and armed services committees in late July, he brought small comfort for Joseph and other White House true believers. On the afternoon of July 28, Tenet told Kay he should sit in on the CIA’s daily morning briefing of the president the next day. But when Kay walked into the Oval Office that morning, Bush greeted him and said he was looking forward to his briefing. “No one told me that I was doing the briefing,” Kay later recalled.
In the room with Bush were Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Tenet, Rice, Card, and other aides. Kay tried to be gentle. He emphasized that the WMD hunt was still a work in progress. Answers weren’t likely to be derived quickly due to various impediments: the looting, the difficulty in locating Iraqi scientists, the poor security situation. He mentioned his theory that Iraq might have had a surge production capacity for chemical weapons. But he couldn’t avoid the bottom line: He had found nothing. As for the trailers, he said they were probably not bioweapons labs, as the CIA had claimed.
Kay discerned no disappointment coming from Bush. The White House had just been rocked by the controversy over the State of the Union claims and the Wilson op-ed. But the president seemed disengaged. “I’m not sure I’ve spoken to anyone at that level who seemed less inquisitive,” Kay recalled. “He was interested but not posing any pressing questions.” Bush didn’t ask, Are you sure? He didn’t ask about the prospects of finding actual weapons. Or whether WMDs had been hidden or spirited away. Instead, he asked, Kay, what do you need?
Patience, replied Kay. He had been on the job only five or so weeks.
I have a world of patience, Bush replied.
None of the other Bush officials grilled Kay. He was surprised by that, too. Rumsfeld, known for being rough on briefers, had mostly been quiet. “They were all deferential to Bush,” Kay later said.
After leaving the meeting, Kay was perplexed and perturbed. “I cannot stress too much,” he subsequently remarked, “that the president was the one in the room who was the least unhappy and the least disappointed about the lack of WMDs. I came out of the Oval Office uncertain as to how to read the president. Here was an individual who was oblivious to the problems created by the failure to find the WMDs. Or was this an individual who was completely at peace with himself on the decision to go to war, who didn’t question that, and who was totally focused on the here and now and what was to come?”
Kay later met with Cheney and Libby in the vice president’s office, and this session was quite different from Kay’s presentation in the Oval Office. Cheney, who did most of the questioning, drilled down. He asked if Kay was relying on intelligence from the CIA or if he was finding his own facts. It was clear to Kay that Cheney was worried about the credibility of any intelligence coming out of Langley. Kay assured him that he was digging up his own information.
Cheney was very specific with Kay. He wondered if Kay had seen the intelligence—signals intercepts and satellite imagery—indicating there had been prewar movement of Iraqi trucks and aircraft across the Syrian border. He asked how Kay intended to deal with the possibility that Saddam’s WMDs might have been ferried to Syria. (Kay was looking into whether any biological or chemical weapons had been produced in the years before the war. If there had been no weapons, there couldn’t have been an effort to move or hide them.) Cheney even knew that Kay had been negotiating with arms dealers in Damascus, who were offering to sell the Iraq Survey Group documents on Iraq’s prewar armaments deals.
“This was a vice president who was well read in the intelligence and knew the details of the WMD issue,” Kay recalled. He felt no pressure from Cheney to skew his appraisal. But Kay did see a problem in Cheney’s analytical view: “He kept remembering little facts that he thought proved big conclusions. The problem with intelligence is that little facts often don’t prove anything, let alone something big. They’re just pieces of puzzles—sometimes just pieces that don’t even make a puzzle.”
Two days after he briefed Bush, Kay spoke briefly with reporters in a Senate hallway and was more upbeat about the ISG’s prospects than he had been with the president. “We are making solid progress,” he said. The Iraq Survey Group had found “some physical evidence” related to Iraq’s WMDs, he said, but he was not ready yet to talk about it. “It’s very likely,” he added, “that we will discover remarkable surprises in this enterprise.”
WHEN Kay went back to Iraq in August, he soon found that even his “surge capacity” theory for chemical weapons didn’t hold up. The ISG could find no trace of such a program. In his frank, weekly e-mail report, Kay informed Tenet and McLaughlin of his conclusions, which were becoming more solid by the week. But Tenet wasn’t eager to discuss these matters with him. During his first month at the ISG, Kay had usually heard from Tenet after he sent in his weekly report. But now only McLaughlin was responding. Tenet was even skipping the weekly interagency videoconferences on the ISG’s work. “Increasingly, there was no reply from George,” Kay remembered. “Only John. George has a tendency not to want to hear bad news. He drew back and left John to carry the can. My suspicions were trouble for the system.” And McLaughlin was not yet willing to absorb the bad news. In September, Kay met with McLaughlin and presented what his ISG had found on the tubes and the mobile weapons labs. McLaughlin, Kay recalled, wouldn’t accept the findings.
“John and George had believed the WMDs were there,” Kay later said. “I think they understood how weak the available evidence was. They understood the holes. McLaughlin was too good an analyst not to have seen the weaknesses. But the evidence didn’t matter because the weapons would be found. They were confident the WMDs would be there. But these are the people whose antennae should’ve gone up.” Now their antennae were withdrawn. Kay believed Tenet and McLaughlin were in denial. “I became,” he noted, “the turd on the table.”
THE lack of WMDs was but one worry for the Bush administration—and perhaps no longer the most pressing. As the summer of 2003 ended, it was becoming evident that the war wouldn’t be over anytime soon. In early July, a testy Donald Rumsfeld had declared that there was no “guerrilla war” in Iraq. Yet chaos and conflict were spreading, as the insurgents—former Baathists, foreign jihadists, Sunni partisans, and Iraqis who just wanted Americans out of their country—adopted deadlier and more sophisticated tactics. In early August, a car bomb exploded outside the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, killing at least eleven people and sparking fears that guerrilla fighters were turning toward so-called soft targets. I
n the middle of the month, saboteurs blew up an oil pipeline in the north. On August 19, a truck bomb blew up the UN headquarters in Baghdad, killing twenty, including UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello. Afterward, humanitarian aid agencies began evacuating workers. Then a car bombing in Najaf killed more than a hundred people. Daily attacks were on the rise—and Iraqis’ complaints about the lack of electricity, the absence of security, the slow pace of reconstruction, and rampant crime were becoming louder.
In the United States, commentators and politicians debated whether Bush had sent a sufficient number of troops to Iraq and whether it had been wise to disband the Iraqi Army. Bush aides repeatedly insisted that progress was being made. “We must remain patient,” Rice said to the annual convention of Veterans of Foreign Wars. Rumsfeld downplayed the threat posed by the enemy, telling the same group, “The resistance our coalition faces today may appear more significant than otherwise might have been the case.” He claimed no additional U.S. troops were needed in Iraq. Speaking to the American Legion national convention, Bush claimed that “there’s steady progress toward reconstruction and civil order.”
With the president’s approval numbers slipping, Bush and his aides in early September—at the time of the second anniversary of 9/11—decided he should address the nation in prime time. He had spent the eight months before the invasion selling the war. Now, nearly half a year since launching it, Bush and his aides were finding they had to keep defending the policy. Speaking from the Cabinet Room, with a bust of George Washington behind him, Bush tied the war in Iraq to the post-9/11 effort to roll back “the terrorist threat…at the heart of its power.” He depicted the Iraqi resistance as being a problem in only one area of the country. He announced he would submit a budget request for $87 billion to cover the costs of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. He vowed not to be chased out of Iraq by “the terrorists.” He said little about weapons of mass destruction.
Cheney was also unyielding.
On September 14, he appeared on Meet the Press, and host Tim Russert grilled him on the administration’s prewar arguments. Cheney once again talked about links between Saddam’s regime and bin Laden, claiming that Iraq’s support for al-Qaeda was “clearly official policy.” He once more cited the Czech report about Mohamed Attta in Prague as though it were still credible. He ignored the dispute over mobile bioweapons labs and insisted without equivocation that the U.S. government had found “two of them”—even though David Kay had told him that was not true.
Asked about Joe Wilson, Cheney gave no hint that he had spent June and July gathering information about the former ambassador to discredit Wilson’s story. “I don’t know Joe Wilson. I’ve never met Joe Wilson,” he told Russert. “I have no idea who hired him.”
Russert asked, If CIA analysts were to be proven wrong, “shouldn’t we have a wholesale investigation into the intelligence failure…”
“What failure?” Cheney interjected.
“That Saddam had biological, chemical, and is developing a nuclear program,” Russert replied.
“My guess is in the end they’ll be proven right, Tim.”
BUSH was now trying to build support for the war by portraying it as a struggle against terrorists: Saddam holdouts (not willing to give up power and allow a democracy to take root in Iraq) and al-Qaeda wannabes (looking to fight America wherever they could). But government experts were wrangling over whether it was that simple.
Earlier in the summer, U.S. Central Command had asked the intelligence community for a National Intelligence Estimate on the sources of violence and instability in Iraq. The request had triggered a fierce interagency battle that would continue for months. “The essential question,” Wayne White, the Iraq specialist at the State Department’s INR, later said, “was, who the hell is shooting at us and why?” White became involved in this project near the beginning of August, and the first draft he saw of the NIE was, in his view, “terribly one-dimensional.” The anti-American fighters were dismissed as mainly former regime elements. But White believed that the insurgency was being stoked by various factors beyond the desire of former Baathists to regain power. The infrastructure was destroyed, the electricity was often off, and many Iraqis had lost jobs, had property destroyed, and had relatives killed or arrested. The country was being occupied. All of this was creating anger and resentment that was fueling the insurgents. White coined a term for the phenomenon: Pissed-Off Iraqis.
The draft NIE didn’t regard the insurgency as sufficiently serious or likely to continue growing, and it contained no clear statement that the situation in Iraq would probably worsen. “Administration officials and many intelligence professionals—did not grasp,” White recalled, “the depth of the political, economic, religious, ethnosectarian, and psychological well from which the insurgency was drawing much of its increasing strength.” He assumed that the insurgency was not going to wind down slowly.
White took his concerns to a meeting at a CIA conference room. Analysts from various agencies—twenty or so people—sat around the table. When he voiced his reservations about the NIE draft, a vigorous debate followed. Other analysts were less worried that the insurgency would expand. White tried, as he later recounted, “to drive home the sheer magnitude of the insurgency’s recruiting and support base in Iraq’s Sunni Arab heartland.” The national intelligence officer in charge of the estimate, according to White, was surprised by his negative take, and he didn’t seem anxious to carry this message to government higher-ups. White wouldn’t back down. “We got some of the changes we wanted into the draft,” White recalled, “which weren’t enough.” At the end of the meeting, a CIA representative said she would have to see if her agency would support the downbeat revisions.
More meetings would be held regarding this NIE, and the interagency debate would continue. It was as if the government’s top experts on Iraq were reflecting the views of the leaders of the administration by not coming fully to terms with the profound challenge Bush’s invasion had created. But intelligence community analysts would eventually agree with White’s pessimistic assessment and accept it as their official position in a formal NIE. Top administration officials, however, remained unrestrained in supplying upbeat assessments. “The level of resistance continues out there, obviously,” Cheney said in mid-September, “but I think we’re making major progress against it…. The fact is that most of Iraq today is relatively stable and quiet.” Rumsfeld noted that the U.S. military was engaged in “a relatively small number of incidents per day…that last a relatively few minutes.” U.S. forces, he claimed, were training 70,000 Iraqi troops, who would soon take over security in Iraq. “The goal,” he said, “is to not spend a long time in Iraq…. It is moving at a very rapid pace.”*64
IN THE weeks after the Novak column, the CIA/Plame leak received little media coverage, and the Niger controversy faded from the news. Joe Wilson, though, was still talking about it. On August 21, at a town meeting in Seattle convened by Democratic Representative Jay Inslee, Wilson said that he was hoping for an investigation of the CIA leak because “wouldn’t it be fun to see Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs?”
Whether Wilson knew it or not, CIA lawyers were quietly working on the case. On September 5, the agency, possibly as a reminder, faxed to the Justice Department’s criminal division the letter it had sent five weeks earlier noting that a crime might have occurred. Then on September 16, the CIA provided the Justice Department with a memo outlining the results of its inquiry and requested that the FBI open a criminal investigation of the Plame leak. The CIA was asking the FBI to start an inquiry that would target the White House.
The CIA and the Justice Department managed to keep the referral under wraps for only ten days.
Take it wherever it goes.
—FBI DIRECTOR ROBERT MUELLER
17
The Investigation Begins
ON THE evening of September 26, 2003, White House press aide Adam Levine was having drinks in Georgetown wi
th colleagues when an urgent message popped up on his BlackBerry. MSNBC had posted a story on its Web site reporting that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to investigate the Plame leak. The story had a grabber of a headline: “CIA Seeks Probe of White House.” The news confirmed that Valerie Wilson had been an undercover officer; otherwise the agency wouldn’t have had grounds to request an inquiry. And for the administration, the implication was ominous: if somebody at the White House had disclosed her name, that person could be in criminal jeopardy.
Levine shared the news with the rest of his party. One of them looked anxious. “I got to go,” said Mike Allen, a Washington Post White House correspondent. “I got to follow up on this.” He dashed off.
The next morning, there was nothing in the Post or any of the other major papers about the criminal referral. Levine was surprised, but he soon saw that Allen was working the story hard. Throughout the day, the Post reporter sent him e-mails and called repeatedly. He told Levine that the Post had learned that White House officials had called several reporters about Plame. Allen didn’t know who had made the calls. But he mentioned that Rove had been involved. He wanted to talk to White House press secretary Scott McClellan, who so far hadn’t returned his call.
That afternoon, about 3:00, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice wandered by Levine’s office. She was looking to discuss her upcoming appearances on Meet the Press and Fox News Sunday—what she was likely to be asked and how she should respond. McClellan came by and joined them. As they went over what was in the news, Levine shared what he had learned from Allen—that the Post had evidence White House aides had called reporters about Joe Wilson’s wife. If so, White House officials would be the prime targets of the Justice Department’s criminal investigation. Let’s “knock it down,” McClellan proposed.
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