*4After the invasion, the CIA determined that one INC-linked Iraqi defector who described Salman Pak as a terrorist training camp to Vanity Fair had “embellished and exaggerated his access.” Asked if any al-Qaeda operatives or other sources had confirmed that terrorist training occurred at Salman Pak, CIA and DIA analysts told the Senate intelligence committee that none had. A DIA analyst said that the INC “has been pushing information for a long time about Salman Pak and training of al-Qa’ida.”
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*5Even if Miller hadn’t known about the flunked polygraph, the Times story still hyped al-Haideri’s account. The headline and the first sentence both stated that al-Haideri was asserting that his work had been “for” Iraqi WMD programs. But the story in the fourteenth paragraph pointed out that he acknowledged that he had not “personally visited” one of the purported biological weapons sites he had described to Miller. And it later more carefully stated that he only “believed” that the sites he worked on were for WMD programs. “It is important to note that [al-Haideri] always said he had no first-hand knowledge of any WMD,” the INC’s Sethna noted in an e-mail exchange with the authors in July 2006. “He said that he had been contracted to build laboratories and research facilities as well as some storage facilities that seemed suspicious.” The Times’ exaggerated account was further embellished in the White House white paper, which baldly stated that al-Haideri said he had visited “twenty secret facilities for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.”
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*6Dobie McArthur, a Pentagon official dispatched by Wolfowitz after the war to examine voluminous Iraqi security records, reviewed the Iraqi security file on Yasin. He found no evidence that Yasin or anybody else associated with the 1993 World Trade Center attack had received any support from Baghdad for the 1993 bombing. McArthur did see records suggesting that Yasin, after fleeing to Baghdad, had been given a monthly stipend but was restricted in his movements and kept under constant surveillance.
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*7Wolfowitz and Mylroie had an old-school connection through the Telluride House—an elite, intellectually oriented residence at Cornell University, once known as a haven for followers of the prominent conservative philosopher Allan Bloom. As a Cornell student in the early 1970s, Mylroie lived in the Telluride House. Wolfowitz had resided there earlier and was a board member of the Telluride Association. As James Mann, author of Rise of the Vulcans, noted, Wolfowitz hired members of the Telluride community when he went into government. Mylroie was a part of this informal network, according to writer Francis Fukuyama, another Telluride alumnus.
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*8By this point, the PNAC, which Kristol had created the previous June, had become the leading advocate for war in Iraq. In its founding statement, the group had called for expansion of the U.S. military so Washington could preserve and extend “an international order friendly to our security.” That statement had been signed by twenty-five heavyweight political figures, including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Libby.
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*9Two days earlier, a British Cabinet Office briefing paper had stated, “A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise. As already made clear, the U.S. military plans are virtually silent on this point.”
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*10Eventually, her real name would be identified as Laura Montini, and she would, at one point, deny to reporters that she even knew Rocco Martino.
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*11Coincidentally—or not—Zahawie himself was a figure of interest to the CIA and its Western partners, according to the CIA’s Tyler Drumheller. The CIA suspected that Zahawie was disenchanted with Saddam’s regime and thus might be open to recruitment by the agency or another Western intelligence service.
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*12Years later, Martino, when talking to La Repubblica, claimed that “SISMI wanted me to pass the documents of the Niger dossier on to the allied intelligence, but at the same time they didn’t want anyone to know of their involvement in the operation.” Considering Martino’s track record and the fact that he had given varying accounts to different news organizations, his credibility was open to question. SISMI denied this charge. Another fact that fueled speculation about SISMI’s role was a visit by Nicolò Pollari, the SISMI director, to Washington on September 9, 2002, during which he met with Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. This was two days before the NSC asked the CIA to approve proposed speech language for Bush using the Niger charge. An NSC spokesperson said that this had been a courtesy meeting and the issue of Niger had not come up.
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*13In his book, The Politics of Truth, Wilson noted he had spoken to Mayaki again in early 2004, and the former prime minister told Wilson he now recalled the identity of the Iraqi with whom he had met at the OAU meeting: Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, also known as “Baghdad Bob,” Saddam’s reality-denying information minister at the time of the U.S. invasion. While watching television before the invasion, Mayaki had recognized al-Sahaf.
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*14The British report did note that there was no “definitive intelligence” indicating that the 60,000 aluminum tubes sought by Iraq were destined for a nuclear weapons program and that the British Joint Intelligence Committee “judged that while sanctions remain effective Iraq would not be able to produce a nuclear weapon.”
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*15Two days after 9/11, FBI agents in Cairo sent in a report noting that Atta had two sisters and mentioning no male siblings. Later, Terry McDermott, a Los Angeles Times reporter, traveled to Cairo and met with Atta’s father, mother, and sisters for research on his book, Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers, Who They Were, Why They Did It. McDermott inspected all available public records, including birth certificates of members of Atta’s family. “There are many things I’m not sure of, but one thing I am,” McDermott told the authors in May 2006. “There’s no brother.”
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*16The 9/11 Commission later reported that Czech officials reviewed flight and border records and surveillance photos from the area near the Iraqi Embassy and found no evidence that Atta had been in Prague on April 9. The Czech government also reported that al-Ani had been away from Prague on the morning of April 9, when the meeting allegedly happened. The commission’s report noted that Atta was an unlikely partner for Iraqi intelligence. It said that Binalshibh, who was captured in 2002, had told his interrogators that bin Laden was upset with Saddam for committing atrocities against Iraqi Muslims and would never have approved of a meeting between Atta and al-Ani. The commission concluded, “The available evidence does not support the original Czech report of an Atta–al-Ani meeting.”
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*17Where did the Feith team get the idea that bin Laden was meeting on a farm in Sudan when he was actually thousands of miles away in Afghanistan? The information, the 9/11 Commission later found, had originated with a “third hand” report from a foreign intelligence service. This service had obtained the information through two unidentified intermediaries. Officers of this service had never spoken to or met with the original source.
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*18CIA officer John Maguire got a glimpse of Rumsfeld’s view of the agency when he was briefing the secretary and others in Rumsfeld’s office suite. In the middle of the briefing, Rumsfeld suddenly got up, went to his desk, and started working—without saying a word. Assuming the briefing was over, Maguire quietly left the office. But General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, chased after him and tried to apologize. “Sometimes the secretary can be abrupt,” Myers explained. Maguire replied, “You’re the highest-ranking military officer in the country. You don’t have to apologize to me.” For Maguire, the incident reflected what Rumsfeld thought of the CIA: “He had no use for us.”
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*19In early 2000, the CIA obtained intelligence i
ndicating that these two suspected terrorists may have entered the United States. But it did not place them on the State Department’s terrorist watch list and did not share this information with the FBI. The bureau did not learn about the two men’s possible presence in the country until August 2001. The FBI then initiated a perfunctory search for the pair—a search that was still under way on September 11. Had the CIA passed along the information earlier, U.S. officials might have been able to locate these two would-be hijackers, who had been residing in San Diego under their real names. One had even been listed in the phone book.
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*20Later Feith would claim that Tenet had told him that the session had been “very helpful.” Other CIA officials would say that much of the material in the briefing had already been discounted and that Tenet had never incorporated the Feith information into his briefings to Congress.
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*21The ultimate resolution of the assassination case raised further questions about the strength of the evidence. After the initial publicity surrounding the trial faded, the Kuwaiti State Security Court quietly commuted the sentences for four of the six plotters who had received the death sentence in the case. The emir of Kuwait then declined to sign the death warrants for the remaining two, including al-Ghazali. The Kuwaiti government gave no public explanation of these actions. After the Iraq invasion, the U.S. military seized millions of pages of Iraqi documents, including many from the files of the Mukhabarat. As of mid-2006, the U.S. government hadn’t released any information pointing to Iraqi government complicity in the 1993 Kuwait incident.
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*22Bush was also talking tough about Democrats. At a speech in New Jersey on September 23, 2002, Bush declared that Democrats in the Senate were “not interested in the security of the American people.” He was referring not to Iraq but to the ongoing tussle over the legislation creating the Department of Homeland Security. Senate Democrats wanted to preserve traditional federal workplace rules at the new department; Bush wanted to remove these protections to ensure greater hiring-and-firing flexibility. Two days later, in a floor speech, Daschle, citing Bush’s remark, yelled, “That is outrageous! Outrageous!”
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*23In early 2004, the CIA would formally recall all its reporting on al-Libi. “They needed some evidence, and he gave it to them,” said one bitter veteran FBI counterterrorism agent years later. “In the court of public opinion, anything goes.”
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*24To back its assertion that the Iraqis were “vigorously” procuring uranium, the NIE cited a “foreign government service” report of the Niger deal—a reference to the original SISMI cable—as well as “reports” that indicated that Iraq had also sought uranium from Somalia and “possibly” the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But, the NIE added, “we cannot confirm whether Iraq successfully succeeded in acquiring uranium…from these sources.” In 2006, McLaughlin said, “There probably should have been more neon on the phrase ‘that it hasn’t been confirmed.’ ” (In fact, the CIA had not confirmed that Iraq had even tried to buy uranium from any of these countries.)
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†1As wrong and overstated as the NIE was, it was more sober than other intelligence that reached the White House. Years later, the White House commission on WMDs reported, “Even more misleading [than the NIE] was the river of intelligence that flowed from the CIA to top policymakers over long periods of time—in the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) and in its more widely distributed companion, the Senior Executive Intelligence Brief (SEIB). These daily reports were, if anything, more alarmist and less nuanced than the NIE…. The PDBs and SEIBs,with their attention-grabbing headlines and drumbeat of repetition, left an impression of many corroborating reports where in fact there were very few sources. And in other instances, intelligence suggesting the existence of weapons programs was conveyed to senior policymakers, but later information casting doubt upon the validity of that intelligence was not. In ways both subtle and not so subtle, the daily reports seemed to be ‘selling’ intelligence—in order to keep its customers, or at least the First Customer, interested.” This was a polite way of saying that Tenet and McLaughlin were serving up dishes they knew the boss wanted.
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*25Years later, Hagel said that the White House had used “the pressures of the election to get this thing done before the election. The intensity, the manipulation, the tone of the speeches, the urgency. They were maximizing the sense Americans had that we could be attacked tomorrow. There was no question that this was being manipulated.”
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*26The Nevada Test Site training of the Scorpions was separate from the Defense Department’s effort to train a contingent of Iraqi exiles dubbed the Free Iraqi Forces at an air base in Hungary. These Iraqi exiles were supposed to serve as scouts who would accompany the U.S. military when it entered Iraq. The administration spent about $200 million on the program, which, as envisioned by the office of Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith, would attract up to five thousand Iraqi exiles. “At the end of the day, about sixty guys showed up,” recalled one White House official involved in this project.
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*27The existence of the rogue state document also undermined the theory—later propounded by some journalists and bloggers—that the Niger papers were forged as part of a covert disinformation campaign designed to encourage Washington to invade Iraq. Proponents of this idea would have to account for why supposedly sophisticated operatives (presumably connected to intelligence agencies) would have concocted such a bizarre and unbelievable companion document.
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*28Gordon’s partner on the first tubes story, Judy Miller, had in recent weeks continued to report dramatic WMD allegations. In one piece, she noted that Iraq had purchased large quantities of a drug that could be used as an antidote for several chemical weapons. (Afterward, the AP noted that the United States and the United Nations had okayed Iraq’s purchases of this drug, a medicine commonly used to revive heart attack victims.) In another story, Miller reported that an unidentified informant had told the CIA that Iraq had obtained an especially virulent form of smallpox in 1990 from a Russian scientist, who had died in 2000. In another piece, Miller said that “former Iraqi scientists, military officers and contractors have provided American intelligence agencies with a portrait of Saddam Hussein’s secret programs to develop and conceal chemical, biological and nuclear weapons that is starkly at odds with the findings so far of the United Nations weapons inspectors.”
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*29McLaughlin, according to an intelligence official, “saw one small piece of the [draft] speech which came over separately and was brought to his office by one of our staff officers. That section was focused on terrorism. John often had to fight to prevent White House speechwriters from overstating the Iraq–al-Qaeda connection.”
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*30A day earlier, Hans Blix, the chief UN inspector, had said that Iraq “has on the whole cooperated rather well so far” with the inspectors in Iraq but had failed to provide documentation sought by Blix.
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*31Three years later, White House speechwriter Matthew Scully—the author of a book on the senseless slaughter of animals by big game hunters—would look back on his experiences writing Bush’s Iraq speeches with no regrets. Neither he nor any of the other speechwriters, he said, had had any “independent knowledge” of the intelligence on Iraq. In any case, he noted, “I did not for one moment believe that I was involved in anything deliberately deceptive, and I don’t believe that today. The basic argument was that ultimately it was for Saddam Hussein to prove he had no weapons of mass destruction, and without that proof, it was America’s responsibility to act.”
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*32Wilkerson thought the chill went back to the first Bush administration. Powell had even alluded to this in his memoir, M
y American Journey, noting how at the end of the administration, Cheney had just disappeared from his secretary of defense office—with nary a good-bye to Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Cheney left the Pentagon and never said a word to him,” remembered Wilkerson, who was Powell’s chief aide at the time. “No farewell, no bye-bye, no ‘Job well done,’ no ‘Job poorly done.’ One day he was there, the next day he wasn’t.”
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*33A Pentagon intelligence officer who was aware of the fabrication notice sent out on al-Harith attended two preparation meetings for the Powell speech, but he raised no objections to using al-Harith as a source. He later told Senate investigators he was unaware that the source mentioned in the draft—who was not identified by name—was al-Harith.
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*34The use of the NSA intercepts by Powell would seem to some observers one of the more persuasive elements in his presentation. But three months later, then NSA director Michael Hayden was a guest of Newsweek magazine at the White House correspondents dinner and was asked by a reporter to explain how the seemingly damning intercepts squared with the postwar failure to find any WMD. In a revealing moment, Hayden admitted the intercepts were arguably more ambiguous and open to interpretation than Powell had suggested. “If I were a defense lawyer,” Hayden said, “I could make a case” that the intercepts didn’t mean what Powell said they did.
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*35Years later, Wilkerson noted that it was only after Powell’s speech that he had heard about the earlier DIA dissent that had questioned al-Libi’s charges and had learned that al-Libi, as Wilkerson put it, had been questioned “under conditions of torture or near torture.” He noted, “This was disturbing because no such dissent was ever made known to me during the preparations [for Powell’s speech]…Al-Libi’s forced testimony was of course crucial to the secretary’s assertions in the presentation that al-Qaeda had substantive links with Baghdad.”
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*36Weeks later, shortly before the invasion of Iraq, McGrory wrote a column clarifying her endorsement of Powell’s presentation: “I did not make it clear enough that while I believed what Colin Powell told me about Saddam Hussein’s poison collection, I was not convinced that war was the answer.”
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