Hubris
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*37White was right. His study was leaked—but, he later said, not by him. On March 14, the Los Angeles Times published a front-page story disclosing the paper under the headline “Democracy Domino Theory ‘Not Credible.’ ”
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*38The previous September, Lawrence Lindsey, Bush’s senior economic adviser, had estimated that a war in Iraq could cost more than $200 billion—a rather steep bill. Later, the White House budget chief, Mitch Daniels, suggested that the war could be prosecuted for a much more reasonable $20 billion. (Lindsey was pushed out of the administration in December 2002.) As of January 2006, Congress had appropriated $251 billion for the Iraq War. A study by the Nobel prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard University’s Linda Bilmes estimated the long-term costs at $1.2 trillion, including money for the long-term health care of 16,000 wounded U.S. military personnel, 20 percent of whom had suffered major head or spinal injuries and another 6 percent of whom had lost limbs.
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*39Wolfowitz was in sync with Rumsfeld, who was publicly downplaying the challenge in Iraq. Weeks earlier, the secretary of defense had said of the war, “It could last, you know, six days, six weeks. I doubt six months.”
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*40The NSC official who twice heard Franks mention the lord mayor plan to the president years later asked a senior U.S. officer in charge of U.S. troops in Iraq about this idea. “What are you talking about?” the officer replied. “We were never told to do that.”
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*41Given that the war on Iraq was an elective one, Benson later noted, “we could’ve had the best war plan ever, but it wasn’t.” The U.S. government’s failure to develop and implement an effective postinvasion plan haunted Benson. “I took Pepcid AC for a year after I got back,” he said.
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*42ElBaradei also reported that the IAEA’s analysis had definitively concluded the aluminum tubes hadn’t been destined for uranium enrichment. “We have to date found no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapon program in Iraq,” ElBaradei said. At the same time, Hans Blix reported that Iraq was providing “active”—but not “immediate”—cooperation with the UN weapons inspectors and noted that more time would be needed to oversee Iraq’s final disarmament tasks, including destroying a set of prohibited missiles.
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†2A month later—after the invasion of Iraq—the CIA would acknowledge that there was nothing to the Niger charge, that there was no evidence to back up the allegation that Iraq had purchased uranium from Niger or that it even had mounted a serious effort to obtain yellowcake. In a Sense of the Community Memorandum, the National Intelligence Council said, “We judge it highly unlikely that Niamey has sold uranium, yellowcake to Baghdad in recent years. The [intelligence community] agrees with the IAEA assessment that key documents purported showing a recent Iraq-Niger sales accord are a fabrication. We judge that other reports from 2002—one alleging warehousing of yellowcake for shipment to Iraq, a second alleging a 1999 visit by an Iraqi delegation to Niamey—do not constitute credible evidence of a recent or impending sale.”
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*43This source—whose information had been included in the National Intelligence Estimate—had claimed that Iraq had produced a combined nuclear-chemical-biological weapon. Intelligence analysts had rightfully recognized this charge as absurd. Still, they had accepted his other tales about Iraq’s CW efforts. In February 2003, he was given a polygraph test, and he failed. It turned out he was an information peddler whose allegations against Iraq, according to a report the CIA had received from a foreign intelligence service, had possibly been “directed” by a hostile intelligence service.
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*44Months earlier, the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer had said, “There is one thing that I think everybody has overlooked—we are going to have retroactive evidence.” That is, the invasion of Iraq would produce the proof—WMDs—to justify the invasion. He also said, “Iraq will be the first act in the play of an America coming ashore in Arabia…. It’s not just about weapons of mass destruction or American credibility. It’s about reforming the Arab world.”
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*45Prior to the invasion, the CIA’s Anabasis project ended up mounting only a limited number of sabotage operations. CIA-trained paramilitary teams entered western Iraq to blow up power pylons. The operation was compromised, and only one of four towers was destroyed. More successful were the “direct action” ops. Kurdish paramilitary teams, working closely with the CIA, conducted a deadly series of drive-by shootings and ambushes of Iraqi military and Baath Party security officials. These were in effect targeted assassinations against identified regime figures.
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*46As it turned out months later, the looting at the museum was not as terrible as initially reported. Prior to the war, museum officials had hidden more than 8,000 of the museum’s more important pieces. Still, 10,000 artifacts, mostly items of use for study and research purposes, had been stolen, and about 30 pieces of significant value were missing. By the time the real damage to the collection had been assessed, though, the looting of the museum had become a symbol of an inept occupation.
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*47After his brief prominence, the baseball-capped scientist vanished from the pages of the Times, as well as the rest of the media. Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, who was also in Iraq covering WMD issues at the time, tried to follow up on Miller’s scoop and was told that U.S. military officials had been unable to authenticate the Iraqi’s claims or even verify that he was a scientist. Gellman said he was subsequently told that the man was in fact a minor intelligence functionary. Asked about the baseball-cap story several years later, Miller told the authors of this book, “I won’t talk about the baseball-cap guy.”
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*48Wilson later wrote that he had been told by the CIA at his pretrip meeting that the Niger charge was based on an actual sales agreement. (The INR memo written by analyst Doug Rohn about this meeting refers to a discussion of an “alleged contract.”) But Wilson had not been told which Nigerien officials had signed the purported contract. So he had been in a position to suggest that this sales agreement was false but not to challenge specific details within the documents. Over a year after Kristof’s column appeared, Wilson’s critics would point to the Kristof column and accuse Wilson of having overstated the results of his trip by claiming he had personally refuted the Niger papers.
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*49David Kay, the former weapons inspector who was now working for NBC News, filed a report showing the inside of the supposed bioweapons lab. Pointing to equipment within the trailer, Kay said, “This is where the biological process took place.” Was the production of bioweapons, an NBC News anchor asked, the only conceivable purpose of this trailer? Kay replied, “Literally, there’s nothing else for which it could be used.”
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*50In an earlier interview with a Vanity Fair writer on May 10, Wolfowitz said, “For reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue [to justify the war] that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason, but…there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people…. The third one by itself…is a reason to help the Iraqis but it’s not a reason to put American kids’ lives at risk.”
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*51When Libby later appeared before a grand jury and was asked, “Is it fair to say that [Cheney] had told you…that [Wilson’s] wife worked in the functional office of the Counterproliferation of the CIA,” Libby said, “Yes.”
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*52Iran-contra prosecutor Lawrence Walsh said he could not prove beyond a
reasonable doubt that Armitage’s misstatements had been “deliberate.”
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*53In July, Bill Keller, a well-liked veteran at the Times, would be named the new executive editor. One of the top problems on his plate would be the paper’s prewar coverage of the WMD issue—particularly, but not only, Miller’s stories. Yet it would be nearly a year before Keller would confront this touchy matter.
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*54A year later, a British parliamentary committee headed by Lord Butler described the “other intelligence” as reports of the February 1999 trip to Niger by Wissam al-Zahawie, the Iraqi ambassador to the Holy See. British intelligence had assessed that a uranium deal “could have been the subject of discussions” during the visit. This led the Butler commission to conclude that the British government’s assertion about Iraq’s attempts to buy uranium—and Bush’s sixteen words—were “well founded.” Yet the Butler commission noted that the IAEA had obtained excerpts of Zahawie’s travel report, and they contained no reference to any talks about uranium. And no new intelligence had been obtained indicating the Zahawie trip had been related to uranium purchases. Moreover, the idea that Zahawie’s trip could have justified Bush’s assertion was a stretch: Bush had said Saddam had “recently” sought uranium from Africa. At the time of Bush’s speech, the Zahawie visit was nearly four years in the past.
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*55Miller later wrote that she had agreed to these ground rules “because I knew that Mr. Libby had once worked on Capitol Hill.” But after she was criticized for having done so, she told National Public Radio that she had planned to turn the tables on Libby. “I agreed to listen to Mr. Libby’s information on the basis of his attribution as a former Hill staffer,” Miller said. “It is very common in Washington to hear information on the basis of one attribution and then to go back to that source if you’re going to use the information and say, ‘You know, this attribution really won’t fly.’ ” The interviewer asked, “Are you saying you do that frequently, make an agreement to hear information under one—.” Miller cut her off and said, “No, I did not say I do it. I said it is often done in Washington.”
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*56Wilson had contributed $1,000 to the Kerry campaign in May 2003 and had become an adviser to his campaign. But in partisan Washington, it was easy to overlook Wilson’s expertise on Niger and his familiarity with the uranium trade and the fact that he was not considered a fierce Democrat or a Bush administration foe when he accepted the CIA’s invitation. In 1999 Wilson had donated money to George W. Bush for his Republican presidential primary campaign.
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*57On the afternoon of July 8, a friend of Joe Wilson encountered Novak on Pennsylvania Avenue, a few blocks from the White House, and struck up a conversation with the columnist. Without revealing his connection to Wilson, the friend asked what Novak thought of the ongoing Niger controversy and Wilson. The Niger dust-up was a minor matter, Novak replied, and he added that Wilson’s wife was a WMD specialist at the CIA and had sent Wilson to Niger. Novak also told the friend that Wilson, as far as he was concerned, was an “asshole.” After Wilson heard his friend’s report of what Novak had said, he called Eason Jordan, the head of CNN’s news division, and complained that Novak was irresponsibly spreading details about his wife.
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*58After his initial conversation with Harlow, Novak had called Wilson, who was upset that Novak had blurted out information about his wife to a stranger on the street. Novak, according to Wilson’s account, apologized and asked if Wilson would confirm that his wife worked at the CIA. “I told him that I didn’t answer questions about my wife,” Wilson later wrote.
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*59Her reassignment might have been due to Aldrich Ames, the notorious CIA officer who had spied for the Soviets and been arrested in 1994. Ames had served on a promotion panel for DO officers, including NOCs like Plame. Agency officials who conducted a postmortem damage assessment on the Ames case feared that the Soviet mole had shared the identities of CIA officers, including NOCs, with the KGB. As a precaution, some NOCs were brought home. Within the CIA, some officers later came to believe that Plame had been among the officers whose return had been prompted by the Ames case, but it was never clear if Ames had told the Russians about her.
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*60In 1979, the United States revoked Agee’s passport. He eventually settled in Cuba.
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*61A one-page summary of the NIE presented to Bush in October 2002 did include references to the dissents by the Energy Department and the State Department on the aluminum tubes. The White House never publicly indicated whether Bush had read this summary or was aware of these dissents.
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*62White House defenders were mounting their own attacks on Wilson in an effort to undermine his credibility. Clifford May, a former Republican Party spokesman and New York Times reporter, wrote an article for the National Review Web site in which he described Wilson as a “pro-Saudi leftist partisan with an ax to grind.” The reference was to Wilson’s affiliation with the Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank that had accepted contributions from the Saudi government and other Arab states. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Caspar Weinberger, defense secretary under Ronald Reagan, assailed Wilson for having been a “sloppy” investigator with a “less than stellar” record when he was ambassador.
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*63Brokaw had been at the Idaho conference with Tenet and had pressed the CIA director to let him interview Kay, who at this time wasn’t talking to the media. Tenet said, sure. And CIA spokesman Bill Harlow called Kay and told him Tenet wanted him to grant Brokaw an interview.
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*64In September, Rumsfeld spoke at a National Press Club luncheon, where he was asked to explain his March 30 assertion that “we know where [the WMDS] are.” He replied, “Sometimes I overstate for emphasis.”
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*65A day later, the paper ran another Mike Allen story referring to his source for the phone calls as an “administration aide”—not a “senior administration official” (as Allen had described him in the original story). Allen’s source had been quietly downgraded. In an October 8, 2003, article on Newsweek’s Web site, reporters Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball first raised the question of the accuracy of the Post story. “Some government officials now believe,” they reported, that “most, if not all, of these phone calls were made after the Novak column appeared.” Within the Post, there was concern about the first article and discussions about whether any correction was warranted, according to Post sources. But no action was taken. The editors and reporters involved, one Post correspondent subsequently said, “had no real desire to let people know we fucked this up.” A year later, the Post ran a piece by reporter Susan Schmidt noting that government investigators had been trying to confirm the allegation in Allen’s story but had failed to do so. Post Executive Editor Len Downie declined to discuss the paper’s internal deliberations relating to the story.
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*66Some administration critics later jumped on the fact that Gonzales waited almost twelve hours to instruct White House aides to preserve their notes and e-mails. “Every good prosecutor knows that any delay could give a culprit time to destroy the evidence,” griped Senator Charles Schumer. But given that the leak had occurred more than two months earlier, any White House staffer determined to destroy relevant evidence had already had ample time to do so.
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*67This flurry of phone calls would later draw intense scrutiny from FBI agents and prosecutors who were at first suspicious that the four men might have been coordinating their stories. But Powell and Duberstein maintained they had only been trying to ascertain the facts.
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*68Toward the end of October, Kay’s investigators concluded that Curveball was nothing but a fabricat
or and that his reporting was all false. But WINPAC officers at CIA headquarters, as well as McLaughlin and Tenet, continued to support Curveball. Kay was now certain that the trailers were not WMD labs. He initially considered unconvincing the theory that they were facilities for producing hydrogen for military weather balloons. “Then we found out,” he said, “that in the 1980s the Iraqis got a mobile production unit [for making hydrogen] from a European country. Rather than go back and buy another, they made some.”
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*69Kay’s report prompted I-told-you-sos from former UN inspectors. Rolf Ekeus, a Swedish diplomat who had overseen UN inspections in Iraq in the 1990s, said the Kay report had come as no surprise to him. UN experts, he noted, had much earlier concluded that “Iraq was just working on preserving their capability to eventually reestablish their weapons.” He added, “I think the Americans were misled” about the WMD threat. Hans Blix, who had overseen the prewar UN inspections, said, “It’s a long way from finding some minor things, as [Kay] did, to concluding Iraq was an imminent danger…. In many cases, Kay’s report says [the programs he discovered] may be suitable for this or suitable for that. Well, a butcher’s knife is also suitable for murder.”
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*70Months later, Tenet would testify in Congress that the CIA “did not agree with the way the data was characterized” in the Feith memo.
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*71Cheney would go even further than the Feith memo. In an interview with NPR, he would claim that “there’s overwhelming evidence” of an Iraq–al-Qaeda connection and note that Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the attackers in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, had been “put on the payroll and provided a house, safe harbor and sanctuary” in Iraq. This was one of Laurie Mylroie’s arguments. He would also say the trailers found in Iraq were definitely mobile bioweapons labs.