Hubris

by Michael Isikoff

  Then Fitzgerald started calling top White House officials before the grand jury.

  Rove appeared twice in February. He acknowledged his brief conversation with Novak but denied he had spoken to anybody at Time. Then Libby appeared before the grand jury twice, on March 5 and March 24. Libby may have felt locked in by the statements he had previously given to the FBI—at a time when he probably hadn’t envisioned a prosecutor like Fitzgerald taking over the case. He offered a convoluted explanation of his actions (and state of knowledge) in the weeks prior to the Novak column that outed Valerie Wilson.

  Before the grand jury Libby conceded that Cheney had first told him in mid-June 2003 that Wilson’s wife worked at the Counterproliferation Division of the CIA’s operations directorate. Libby had no choice but to acknowledge this. It was in his notes. Libby was a meticulous note taker; Fitzgerald had copies of his notes detailing his conversations with Cheney on the subject. But Libby claimed he had forgotten all about this crucial fact—Valerie Wilson’s employment at the CIA—and wouldn’t learn it anew until he called up Tim Russert on July 10, 2003, and Russert told him about Wilson’s wife.

  Referring to that conversation, Libby said, “It seemed to me as if I was learning it for the first time.” Libby wasn’t saying that the call with Russert had reminded him of a fact that had slipped his mind; he was maintaining that he had completely forgotten what he had learned weeks earlier from his boss—and that Russert’s reference to Valerie Wilson hadn’t even refreshed his memory. It was an odd defense: I knew, I forgot, I learned it again, and I forgot I had known it already.

  Testifying to the grand jury, Libby maintained that Russert had said to him, “Did you know that Ambassador Wilson’s wife…works at the CIA?…All the reporters know it.” And Libby described his reaction to Russert:

  I remember being taken aback by it…and I said, no I don’t know that. And I said, no, I don’t know that intentionally because I didn’t want him [Russert] to take anything I was saying as in any way confirming what he said, because at that point in time I did not recall that I had ever known, and I thought this is something that he was telling me that I was first learning.

  As for his conversations with Matt Cooper and Judy Miller, Libby testified that he had told both that he had heard from “other reporters” that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA and that she had had a hand in sending him to Africa. But he testified that he had told these reporters that this wasn’t information he knew on his own. “I didn’t know he had a wife,” Libby told the grand jury. “That was one of the things I said to Mr. Cooper. I don’t know if he’s married.”

  In questioning Libby before the grand jury, Fitzgerald and his team focused on the vice president. They asked Libby again and again about his conversations with Cheney. Libby acknowledged that Cheney had been “upset” about the Wilson op-ed and that the vice president had discussed it with him “on multiple occasions each day.” Libby said that Cheney “wanted to get all the facts out about what he had or hadn’t done” regarding Wilson’s trip to Niger. Cheney, Libby added, “was very keen on that, and said it repeatedly. Let’s get everything out.” Libby testified that Cheney

  asked, is this normal for them to just send somebody out like this un-compensated, as it says. He was interested in how did [this] person come to be selected for this mission. And at some point…[his] wife worked at the Agency, you know, that was part of the question.

  Libby was careful on a critical point, however. Cheney had written questions about Valerie Wilson on his copy of Joe Wilson’s July 6 op-ed article, including the one asking if Wilson’s wife had sent him on a “junket.” But Libby, in his second grand jury appearance, claimed he had not talked with Cheney about the role Wilson’s wife might have played in the trip until more than a week later—after the Novak column was published on July 14 (and when it would no longer have been a crime to pass along the information to anybody outside the government).

  Judging from their questions, the prosecutors found this hard to believe. In Libby’s telling, during the week following Wilson’s op-ed, he and Cheney had spoken multiple times “each day” about all the vice president’s various concerns related to the Wilson trip—except the one issue that had become the subject of a criminal investigation. During his second grand jury appearance, Libby was asked:

  As you sit here today, are you telling us that his [Cheney’s] concerns about Ambassador Wilson, his concern that he’s working pro bono, his concerns that he’s an ambassador being sent to answer a single question, his concern that his wife may have sent him on a junket, would not have occurred between July 6th and July 12th when you were focusing on responding to the Wilson column but instead would have occurred much later?

  Libby replied:

  The only part about the wife, sir, I think might not have occurred in that week.

  Was Libby concocting a story to protect himself? Or was it to protect his boss? After all, if Libby had leaked classified information at the urging of the vice president, Cheney could be vulnerable to a conspiracy charge.

  None of this was public at the time. Even the fact that Libby and Rove had appeared before the grand jury had gone unnoticed by the press. But by the time Libby was done testifying at the end of March, two things about the case were clear to the investigators. One was that the actions of the vice president were central to the leak investigation. The other was that there would be no way to test the truthfulness of Libby’s implausible account other than to talk to Tim Russert, Judy Miller, Matt Cooper, and any other reporters with whom he might have spoken. And if the journalists wouldn’t agree to talk, Fitzgerald would have to subpoena them.

  THE spring of 2004 was an ugly time in Iraq. On March 31, 2004, four U.S. contractors for Blackwater Security were ambushed and killed in the city of Fallujah. Their bodies were burned, ripped from their vehicles, and dragged through the streets by an angry mob shouting “Death to America.” Five days later, U.S. Marines cordoned off the city of 300,000 and began a block-by-block search for the insurgent leaders responsible for the atrocities. At the same time, the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr exhorted his followers to “terrorize” and expel the American occupiers; his black-clad private militia, known as the Mahdi Army, overran Iraqi police and seized control of government buildings in Najaf and several other Iraqi cities. Amid fears of a breakdown in law and order, Bush sounded a defiant note: “America will never be run out of Iraq by a bunch of thugs and killers.”*76

  But the chief political worry for the White House was the impact the war would have on the election. Senator John Kerry, who weeks earlier had clinched the Democratic nomination, was attacking Bush hard on Iraq. Kerry, who had voted for the Iraq War resolution, called Bush’s Iraq policy “inept” and “one of the greatest failures of diplomacy and failures of judgment that I have seen in all the time that I’ve been in public life.” He accused Bush of not acknowledging that the problems in Iraq were severe and “complicated,” and he called for Bush to do more to involve other nations and to hand over the rebuilding of Iraq to an international entity. Kerry suggested more troops were needed in Iraq. (The neoconservative Weekly Standard applauded Kerry for that.) But Kerry aides told reporters that the senator had no plans to deliver a policy speech about Iraq anytime soon. They said they expected the war to be the bloody backdrop of the presidential campaign. Bush aides expected the same.

  The news out of Iraq didn’t improve. In April, 134 American soldiers were killed in Iraq; it had been one of the bloodiest months yet. And there were the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison that showed Iraqi detainees being sexually humiliated, taunted, and mistreated by American military guards. The grotesque images, rebroadcast throughout the Arab world by the Aljazeera satellite network, created a new crisis of legitimacy for the American mission in Iraq. The president’s approval rating was declining. Some polls showed Kerry leading Bush.

  Within the CIA, there was a growing sense of gloom. The CIA’s John Maguire, who had plotted the o
verthrow of Saddam for years, was beside himself. He had helped write a February 2004 aardwolf from the agency’s Baghdad station, warning once again that the insurgency was gaining strength and becoming self-sustaining. But the White House hadn’t wanted to hear it. The only feedback Maguire got from headquarters on the aardwolf was that Rice was “furious” at this description of the insurgency.

  But Maguire was trying to do something about the problem. He and other CIA officers gathered hundreds of former officers of the disbanded Iraqi Army in the al-Rashid Hotel that spring, having been assured that Army Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, the American military commander in Iraq, would come and talk to the group about how they could be rehired for the new Iraqi Army. Yet neither Sanchez nor any of his deputies showed up; Maguire’s unemployed officers went home angry and resentful. Maguire was enraged. The episode was indicative of the entire U.S. approach to the occupation, which had begun, as Maguire saw it, with the senseless de-Baathification policy. “A historic opportunity was being squandered,” Maguire later remarked. The country was being lost “through arrogance and ignorance.” The arrogance was “the idea that we can impose something on a two-thousand-year-old society.” The ignorance was boneheaded, ideologically driven policies such as de-Baathification and the dissolution of the army, which had fueled the anti-American insurgency. Yet neither the White House nor its emissaries in Baghdad were listening.

  At times, the situation inside the Green Zone had an almost surreal quality. Maguire and the CIA station chief would attend Bremer’s morning senior staff meetings. They would try to talk about the deteriorating security problems—and would get no response. “You’d sit in the meetings and you could hear the mortars going off, the windows were rattling,” Maguire recalled. But nobody would say a word about what was going on. It was as though nothing was happening. Bremer, Maguire said, “would just sit there, staring at his boots. He was a weird man.”

  IN MAY, Maguire’s friend, former General Mohammed Abdullah al-Shahwani, who had been the chief of the CIA-trained Scorpions, was named as the interim director of the new Iraqi intelligence service. While he was in the Washington area for a short visit, Shahwani was invited to the White House. When he showed up, he was ushered into the Oval Office to meet with Bush. Cheney, Rice, Tenet, and Card were there, too. The president invited Shahwani to sit down right next to him. Tell me, Bush said, what’s going on in Iraq.

  “Sir, I’m going to tell you something,” the Iraqi intelligence chief said. “You need to know the truth. Baghdad is almost surrounded by insurgents. The situation is not improving.” Shahwani pointed out to the president that the road from the Baghdad airport to the Green Zone in the center of the city was no longer secure. “If you can’t secure the airport highway, you can’t secure all of Iraq,” Shahwani remarked.

  There was an awkward silence in the room. Shahwani noticed the leaders of the American government exchanging glances. It was as though they had never heard this—or that nobody was supposed to speak so bluntly with the president. Bush was surprised by the downbeat assessment, Shahwani thought. Cheney said nothing. Shahwani did most of the talking, and no one asked him for any advice. It seemed strange. After a few minutes, the president got up, had his picture taken with Shahwani, and exchanged a few pleasantries. Then he gave the Iraqi a souvenir tie clip bearing Bush’s signature. Rice took the Iraqi intelligence chief aside. “I want to see you before you leave,” she said. Shahwani went off with Rice. She asked, What can we do? What do you need? Let me know. Shahwani said he would and soon left for Baghdad. But he never again heard from the White House. He left the meeting believing Bush hadn’t gotten the picture.*77

  In May, the CIA station in Baghdad sent another aardwolf to headquarters. It reiterated the bad news of the station’s previous reporting—but, according to Maguire, it conveyed (or tried to convey) a greater sense of urgency. The insurgency, the cable noted, was expanding.

  The White House had a daunting problem. While boasting of progress to bolster the president’s reelection campaign, it couldn’t publicly recognize Iraq was a mess and policy shifts were necessary. In Baghdad, Bremer was working furiously to transfer sovereignty to a new interim government at the end of June—which the White House was pointing to as the next big step forward. But as many experts and commentators outside the administration were saying, securing the country and defeating the insurgency would probably require more American troops. In a candid memo to Rice, Larry Diamond, a senior adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, wrote, “In my weeks in Iraq, I did not meet a single military officer who felt, privately, that we had enough troops. Many felt we needed (and need) tens of thousands more soldiers and…at least another division or two.” Without more U.S. troops, he warned, “I believe we are in serious and mounting danger of failing in Iraq.”

  Diamond, a Stanford political science professor, had been friendly with Rice when she had been the university’s provost. She had personally asked him to go to Iraq. But his tough memo elicited no response. That wasn’t surprising. For the White House, sending more Americans to Iraq would be an admission of error and miscalculation. And acknowledging mistakes wasn’t part of the president’s campaign.

  IN LATE May, Iraqi police, supported by American soldiers, raided the Baghdad home and offices of Ahmad Chalabi, who had become a member of the Iraqi interim governing council created by the U.S. government. U.S. troops seized computers, records, and rifles from two offices of Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. An Iraqi judge said the raids were part of an investigation of assorted crimes: torturing people, stealing cars, seizing government facilities. One of the arrest warrants was for Aras Habib, the INC’s intelligence director. Habib had run the group’s controversial “intelligence collection program,” which had supplied fabricating defectors and bogus information to dozens of media outlets before the war. He also had been suspected by the CIA of being an Iranian agent for years—ever since Bob Baer and Maguire had dealt with him in the mid-1990s.

  Chalabi complained that the raid was retaliation for his criticism of the American management of the occupation. “I call to liberate the Iraqi people and get back our complete sovereignty,” he said, “and I am raising these issues in a way that the Americans don’t like.” But media reports, obviously based on leaks from U.S. officials, disclosed that Chalabi, who openly maintained ties with Iranian officials, was under investigation by the FBI for having handed top secret American information to Iran. He had allegedly told the Iranian intelligence chief stationed in Baghdad that the United States had cracked the code of the Iranian spy service. Condoleezza Rice promised there would be a full criminal inquiry. (The Pentagon’s $340,000 monthly payments to the INC had recently been cut off.)

  Chalabi denied the charge, and his American advocates, including Richard Perle and Jim Woolsey, claimed all these anti-Chalabi actions were politically motivated. Perle insisted that the CIA and DIA were mounting a “smear campaign” against his friend.

  As for Habib, he vanished around the time of the raid on the INC headquarters. His suspicious disappearance raised an intriguing and significant question: Had the fellow responsible for slipping bogus INC “intelligence” on Iraq’s supposed WMDs to U.S. officials and journalists—information concocted to start a war—done so at the behest of Iranian intelligence? Had the U.S. government and the American public been the target of an Iranian intelligence operation designed to nudge the United States to war? These were questions U.S. intelligence agencies never seriously investigated.

  FOR a year, The New York Times had been under pressure from readers, bloggers, and press critics who were demanding the paper explain its prewar reporting on Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, especially the work of Judy Miller. Executive Editor Bill Keller, burdened by other problems at the paper, had resisted calls to look backward. But shortly before the paper’s ombudsman—a new post created in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal—was to address the issue, the paper published an
unusual (and unsigned) editor’s note about its coverage. The note stated that there had been “an enormous amount of journalism that we are proud of” but in “a number of instances” the coverage “was not as rigorous as it should have been.” The paper had relied too much, the editors said, on “information from a circle of Iraqi informants, defectors and exiles bent on ‘regime change’ ”—most prominently Ahmad Chalabi, who had been a “favorite of hard liners within the Bush administration” and a “paid broker” of information from Iraqi exiles. The “problematic” articles included the front-page September 8, 2002, story on the aluminum tubes—the Michael Gordon/Judy Miller piece cited by Cheney on Meet the Press as he kicked off the administration’s campaign to portray Iraq as a threat. The editors also questioned Miller’s postwar April 21, 2003, report on the baseball-capped Iraqi scientist, noting the paper had never established the “veracity of this source” or his claims. It wasn’t even clear, the editors noted, that he was a scientist.

  The paper also distanced itself from Miller’s front-page piece on Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, the INC-coached defector who had claimed there was an extensive network of secret WMD facilities in Iraq (and who had been judged a fabricator by the CIA). This was the article that had been used as source material for the White House white paper released to support the president’s UN speech in September 2002. “In this case it looks as if we, along with the administration, were taken in,” the editor’s note said. Miller had been the author or coauthor of four of the six problem-ridden articles cited by the editors, though the note mentioned no names.

  Sometime after the editor’s note appeared, Keller received a nighttime phone call in his kitchen from an agitated Judy Miller. The Times reporter told him that she was standing in the living room of al-Haideri’s home in northern Virginia. She said he was about to be deported and that she needed to do a story right away exposing this terrible injustice. Keller was furious. Months earlier, he had told Miller to stop reporting on Iraq and weapons of mass destruction. It was as though she hadn’t gotten the message or was just ignoring him. And here she was, still protecting and promoting a defector who had led the Times (and its readers) astray. It was as if she were still fighting the last war.